


Team Free Will Saga

by SkadizzleRoss



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Castiel Being Castiel, Flashbacks, Gen, John Winchester Being an Asshole, Kid Dean Winchester, Kid Fic, Kid Sam Winchester, Kid Winchesters, POV Castiel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-03-16
Updated: 2017-08-10
Packaged: 2018-03-18 02:54:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 38,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3553394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SkadizzleRoss/pseuds/SkadizzleRoss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>[AU]. In an unfamiliar time, the angel Castiel - a lone survivor - fights to free the Winchesters from the inevitable path towards the Apocalypse. But Fate won’t allow its course to be diverted so easily, and there are no allies to be found amongst the distrustful hunters, vengeful angels, and youthful Winchester brothers that Cas encounters in the year 1991.</p>
<p>Here’s a tale told in fic and art, of loyalty, Fate, and the last fight for Free Will.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. show me a road.

_Fate leads the willing, and drags the unwilling._

 

Opening comments: This story is the product of a collaborative story I once wrote with my long-time writing buddy, Zazaphram. All of the excellent Dean and John characterization, nefarious demons, and twisty plot twists are her work. The mopey angel, ADHD Sam and half-assed art are mine. Thanks for the fun ride, Zazaphram. To ye readers, I hope you enjoy!

For more art and other goodies, check out the Tumblr: [teamfreewillsaga.tumblr.com](http://teamfreewillsaga.tumblr.com)

 

 

 

The unseeing eyes of the vessel open to a shadowed ceiling.

Grace pools within the bed of bones and blood he has come to rest in, eddying beneath heavy ribs. He is stunned into thoughtlessness, unconsciousness by the rending currents of the time between times, the space between spaces.

Time passes stagnant, breathless, before the ragged fragments of his grace stir, and coalesce, snapping to conformation around the curvature of a familiar body.

The vessel blinks, shudders, breathes – and Castiel comes back to awareness and physicality with a full-bodied jerk of uncoordinated limbs, twisting and falling to land hard on his knees. The fingers of his left hand curl into the fibers of an unfamiliar carpet. The fingers of his right crumple around a fragment of parchment, ragged and torn on the edges.

“Jimmy?” A woman is calling, alarmed. The air is edged with the sharp taste of electricity.

He is spreading awareness on thin filaments. One thing, one person among millions. For the span of a breath he is certain there will be nothing, not the indistinct blur of a soul well-hidden but the yawning nothing of a soul destroyed. But just as the dread begins to bloom dark and low he finds it, he finds _him_ , finds _Dean_ , and the entirely human emotion of relief washes over him.

Feet crunch on broken glass somewhere ahead of him.

In halting, jerky movements, he presses the parchment flat, folds it along precise lines, and reaches for an inner coat pocket that isn’t there. Just rough cotton. After a temporary falter, he slides it into the unfamiliar texture of a back pocket. Then he shoves towards the close-and-far flicker of Dean.

++++

Outside of a vessel, damage is an abstract thing. It’s agony, yes, a feeling like his essence is being prised apart with a brutal precision. But it isn’t a physical agony, even if he is distinctly aware of every fragment lost.

Within a vessel, exerting himself at the expense of his flagging grace is a riot of physical stimuli: a cold spiral of pain pouring down his spine, the deafening rush of blood to his head, threatening to drown his consciousness altogether.

His hands clutch at a railing digging into the small of his back, and the cold shock of the metal is enough to ground him. His vision clears to a shadowed concrete sidewalk.

He’s leaning against the exterior supports of a scaffold built up against the facade of a brick building. The sidewalk is overshadowed by a ragged patchwork of canvas and plywood. The narrow corridor is largely empty - except for a child.

Dean.

He’s smaller than Castiel remembers. Not smaller— more condensed. His body is smaller; his face rounder with youth, and a riot of freckles across his nose and cheeks that makes him look younger still. But the soul within him burns bright, brighter than Castiel has seen in a long time. Bright as day.

He has a backpack half-slung over his shoulder, a scuffed baseball mitt threaded through one of the straps and dragging down by his knee. He’s not paying attention to where he’s walking; his eyes are on a couple crumpled bills and some coins in his hands.

He’s passing by. Castiel stumbles forward, wrapping his fingers in the flannel of the boy’s jacket.

“The— Hey!” Dean shrugs out of his grip and steps back, abruptly hostile. “Don’t touch me. Who’re you?”

“I need to speak with you.”

“Yeah, well— I don’t know what they told you, but I didn’t do it, and you can’t take me. Leave me alone.”

Dean shoulders past him.

Castiel turns to follow. “You misunderstand. I know you, Dean Winchester.” More urgently, he repeats: “I need to speak with you.”

He stops, and turns. His expression has shifted. He’s afraid, now. Cornered. And all the more dangerous for it. “I think you have the wrong person." He speaks each syllable slow and careful. “I’m Dean Morgan. Just moved here. I don’t know any Winchesters.”

Dean’s eyes shift: up and down the street, above at the scaffolding, back to the sidewalk behind him.

Castiel begins to say, “No, I don’t--” He doesn’t finish. With abrupt speed, Dean hefts a brick from a stack lying against the building and throws it at his face.

The world sparks and grays.

He is studying a blurred expanse of concrete; curling distant, numbed fingers around the edges of a discarded $5 bill; letting heavy eyes fall closed for the span of a breath, or an hour, or a year.

He is awake, and his brothers stand over him.

Sallow-faced Armisael, and his loyal three: Arathon, Saviel, and Calabriel. Surprise blooms bright on the back of his tongue. What follows is more bitter.

Arathon kneels beside him, head cast aside to study the alignment of the stars overhead. “Where have you brought us, brother?” he asks, polite, curious.

“Pick him up,” Armisael says. Arathon catches his elbow and hauls him upright. Castiel is slow and clumsy to gather his feet beneath him. Armisael’s cheek is still flushed with rapidly pooling blood; he has not bothered to repair it, yet.

“He’s come to the past,” Saviel answers. She sounds bored. “Much good it will do him.”

“But it seems--”

Castiel buries a heel in Arathon’s instep. The subtle bones of his arch shatter. It isn't much, but it's enough - Arathon’s grip falters. He tears free and throws himself through the thin stitching of space towards Dean, not far, not far.

He stumbles onto carpet, the taste and smell and feel of city apartment squalor, and Sam

_sam_

the essence of Sam Winchester is looking up at him through a child’s face, brushing brown-blond hair back with a small hand, eyes widening in surprise, fascination. The lock clicks on the apartment door; Sam’s eyes tick to the left.

They’ll follow him. He has four, five seconds before they--

Dean shoulders against the door, shoving it wide. “Sam, are you--” Castiel opens his mouth to speak; but Dean sees Castiel then, and repeats louder, in alarm, “ _Sam_ \--” as he rushes forward to plant himself between.

There isn’t time. Armisael grates at the ragged edges of his grace.

Three; two--

Castiel catches the desperation surging up his throat between clenched teeth and throws himself forward.

He catches his hand on a brick wall smudged with road salt. Rolls into it, and shoves off into a clumsy shuffle. His brothers are closer now; sparking bright at the back of his mind as they search and search and at last land, one by one, within the radius of essence his flight has left behind.

He’s chosen the densest populated area within reach, a crowded station stifled with the noisy silence of humans on their way to and from a hundred inconsequential locations; a bus stop.

A human, a man catches his shoulder, says something in a voice tinged with alarm. Castiel shoves away, and pulls clumsily at the hood attached to his sweatshirt, draws it high to cover his bloodied face.

He falls deeper into the crowd. One face among many, one hidden thing amongst a ruckus of human souls. The angels will have to search by vision alone, and it is a slow and unaccustomed process for them. There’s a spit of air to his left, the hydraulic whine of a bus door sliding open. Castiel pats absently through his pockets, draws the crumpled $5 bill free and steps into the stale air of the bus. The driver gestures impatiently towards the kiosk at his knee. He feeds the bill into the machine with shaking hands and gathers the change that clinks loud against the tray.

His knees give at the first row of seats. Collapsing against the window, he turns a weary eye to the front of the bus, the only entry, the only exit. A man, older, settles in beside him and appraises him with a sidelong stare. Castiel reaches for the sword that isn’t there.

The man digs through his pockets and comes up with a small packet of tissues. This, he presses into Castiel’s slack hand. “Your nose,” he says, and taps his own to indicate.

Castiel presses the cotton to his nose. It comes away bright with blood.

“That from the cold?” the man asks. Castiel nods absently. “Yeah, I get ‘em all the time. This winter. It’s been a bitch, huh?”

In the chaos of the street beyond the tinted glass he sees Arathon, a still figure casting a passive stare over the heads of the crowd. Cold sinks slowly into his gut, and he thinks, not for the first time, not for the last:

_I would kill you. I would be glad._

The bus pulls away; his brothers are lost to the blur of motion.

It's an idle threat. He hadn't been able to bring his sword back with him; hadn't even brought his vessel. A teenager's face stares at him from the bus window's reflection, chin and mouth dark with blood.

“Put your head back. It’ll pass,” the man’s saying. “Soon enough.”

 

 

Dean checks the change slot again, just to give his hands something to do, even though he knows there are no coins there. His foot can’t tap fast enough to burn off all the nervous energy.

“Pick up, dad, pick up, pick up,” he breathes into the receiver.

Sammy is a twitchy shadow at Dean’s back, sneakers scuffing the threshold of the phone booth. “Is he answering? Dean?”

The ringtone clicks over, and he gets the motel clerk again. “Sounds like he’s not picking up. Can I take a message for you, sweetie?”  
  
His breathing sounds loud over the phone. Dean takes a long breath and lets it out slowly. “Yeah, um, can you just tell him Dean called? And that we’ve moved.”  
  
She pops her bubblegum into the phone. “Alright, what’s the new address?”  
  
“Oh, that’s okay. He’ll know it. Thanks though.”  
  
He sets the phone back into the cradle with more force than necessary. He’s got just the one quarter left—must have dropped the rest on the sidewalk—and he wants to save it in case he needs to call the motel again. Pastor Jim will answer collect.

Sam waits a couple beats, absorbing. In the four-block sprint from the motel he’d been afraid, and by the shake in his voice when he says, “Dad didn’t answer?” he still is, but he’s also a seven-year-old, and he’s also Sammy. So that weighty question is immediately followed up with four more in rapid succession: “Are we gonna go to Pastor Jim’s? Uncle Bobby’s? Who was that guy, Dean? How did he just—“ His jacket rustle as he gestures with his hands. Realizing Dean can’t see, he says, “He just appeared, Dean. I saw it.”

“Yeah, we’re gonna go stay with Pastor Jim for a while, okay? Now be quiet.”

He’s only half paying attention as he rattles off the information for the operator.

Sam does as told, though he continues to pace the ground behind Dean’s heels restlessly. Pastor Jim’s voice comes on the line, drowning Sam’s scuffling out. “Dean? Are you alright?”

“Yeah, I’m okay. I wouldn’t call, except my dad said that if anything ever happened—“

“Of course,” Pastor Jim says. “What’s happened?”

“I don’t know, this guy— He was in our motel room. He knew my name.”

“He broke in?”

“Yes. No? Not—“ Not the way a human would break in. The door was locked, the windows were unbroken, and Sam wouldn’t have let him in. Sam’s possibly more freaked out about it than he is. “I threw a brick at his face. That seems to have worked.”

If Dad were here, he’d know who (or what) that guy was. But he’s not.

There’s a pause. “Well—your father’s hunting, I assume? It’d be best if you came here until we can clear the matter. Where are you?”

Dean glances over his shoulder again at the motel. Their door is still shut and the curtains still pulled, but that doesn’t really mean anything. He threads the phone cord around his fingers, and nudges Sam when he won’t stop the shuffling.  
  
“Fort Wayne, Indiana. I called Dad’s motel, but he’s not answering.”

Papers scrape on the other end of the line; Pastor Jim looking at a map, maybe. “I don’t know of anyone in the area, unfortunately, but I could be there in about ten hours.” He pauses again. “However, if you could catch a bus to Madison I could meet you there. Would you be able to do that?”

Dean hesitates. They don’t have any money. But he’s done without before. “Yeah, we can do that.”

“Hold on—“ The line goes quiet for a moment. When he returns, he's still talking all calm and pleasant, as though they're discussing Sunday dinner, not fleeing from some stalker psycho. “There should be a Greyhound station on Lafayette Street, near Washington Boulevard. I’ll call ahead and put two tickets in your name. If anything else happens, find a place that is well-lit and well-populated and call me immediately. If I’ve already left, call Bobby Singer, or the police if need be. Where was your father staying, again?”

“Star Motel, Fayetteville, Arkansas. I have the phone number if you want it.”

“Please.” Dean recites, and Jim repeats it back before adding, "I'll try to reach him. In the meantime, I'll see you in Madison in five or six hours. Okay?"

“Yeah. Yeah. Thanks Pastor Jim.”

“Of course. Be safe, and tell Sam hello for me.”

Sam has gone dangerously still, realizing the conversation is drawing to an end. The second the phone hits the receiver, he practically explodes: “You hit him with a brick?”  
  
“What? You didn’t believe me all those times I said I’d break your face? I’m serious business. Remember that next time you’re hogging the covers. Now c’mon, get your bag. We’re gonna go to the bus station.”

Dean tucks the note with Dad’s number back into his duffel and shoulders it. He thinks Washington is back in the direction of the school. Hopefully they’re not far.

“In the face,” Sam repeats, tuning Dean out in favor of the awe-inspiring badassery of it all. He does pick up his bag, though, so at least there’s that. “Was he a drug dealer or something? Are the cops gonna come arrest him? If he’s a drug dealer he’s some kinda magic drug dealer, Dean, I swear, he just like-- appeared! Like something out of TV or a movie or something--”

“Hey.” He slugs Sam’s shoulder, and steers him down the street. “Enough with that, already. Would you keep it down?”

“Yeah.” Subdued, Sam hefts his bag up and stuffs his free hand in his pocket. “Is Pastor Jim gonna pick us up?”

“Sort of. We’re taking a bus, but he’ll meet us there.”

“Is Dad gonna meet us, too?”

“Pastor Jim’s gonna call him back when he gets off work and tell him what happened. But Dad’s in Arkansas, so we’ll get there before him.”

Sam nods agreeably. “Are you gonna tell Dad about how you hit a guy with a brick?”

“Sam!” Dean grabs him by the cuff and hauls him around so they’re facing each other. “You gotta stop saying that, okay? I can get in a lot of trouble. A lot of trouble. Alright?”

His face pretty much collapses. Eyes dropping to his shoes, he repeats, “Alright” in a small voice. “Sorry,” he adds.

Sam makes him feel kind of bad about that, so he adds, “You did a pretty good job back there, though. You had my back, and you got the room packed up pretty quick. Dad’ll be impressed when I tell him.”

At that, Sam warms from sullen to embarrassed. “No he won’t.”

“Well,” Dean answers in exaggerated agreement, “If you don’t think he’ll be impressed then I won’t say anything.”

Sam screws up his face in a 7-year-old's attempt at a stern look. "Now you're just being a jerk."

“Yeah?” He ruffles Sam’s hair. “Punkass. Now move those stubby little things you call legs. I bet there’s a bus with our name on it waiting at the depot right now.”

They get about four feet before Sam’s rounding back to 20 questions: “So does this mean I get to stay up as late as I want tonight? Can I stay up all night? I bet I could, if you let me. I could stay up ‘til the sun rose again!”

“Slow down turbo, let’s just get on the bus first, okay?”

++++

  
Sam tries to stay awake, he tries really hard. Dean even gave him the window seat, so he can swing his legs and stare out at the trees and stuff, but it’s all dark outside and everything looks the same when it’s dark outside. The bus is dark, too, and Dean says he has to keep his voice down because there’s other people on the bus trying to sleep and stuff.

He thinks about how the guy had loomed over him. He’d been really scared, because the guy was all bloody like the people in those nasty horror movies that Dean watches late at night sometimes when he thinks Sam’s sleeping. And he’d just appeared, Dean keeps acting like he didn’t but Sam’s pretty sure he did, just poofed in and then poofed out like it was nothing at all. Normal people have to use windows and doors, and Sam knows the door was locked ‘cause Dean always locked the door. And it was cold outside, so all the windows were closed, because the heater was on and it rattled at night and kept waking Sam up.

No, he’s pretty sure the guy was just there, and Sam thought he was a monster but he hadn’t looked mad, or scary, he’d looked - surprised. And worried. Monsters hurt people, they don’t look surprised. But then, he had to have been a monster ‘cause Dean hit him with a brick, and Sam wonders if maybe Dean hurt him bad without meaning to, and that’s why he might get in trouble. Dean gets in trouble for fighting at school sometimes, and then Dad has to come talk to the principal or they have to move. Sometimes both.

Sam wants to ask Dean if that’s why, if he thinks the guy’s gonna tell the principal or maybe even the cops, but Sam doesn’t want Dean to get in trouble, so even though the idea has him fidgeting in his seat for awhile he doesn’t say anything. Then Dean asks him if he has to go to the bathroom and Sam says _No_ because he’s not a little kid anymore and he has to stop fidgeting.

He asks Dean how long it’s gonna be, and Dean says four hours, which is _years_. And they already had to sit at the bus stop for awhile, next to this huge kid who had to be in high school _at least._ The kid was listening to loud music on a Walkman that looked a bit like Dean’s, but newer. When Sam saw it he panicked a little about whether he grabbed Dean’s Walkman when he was packing everything, because Dean really likes it, but then he remembered that Dean left it in the car by accident and that Dad said he was keeping it safe. Dad’s good at that kinda stuff. He'd wished Dad was there, sitting in the bus stop with them. Now, watching the little cars drive by under his window and feeling the sleepiness start to drag at his eyes, he wishes Dad was here again. Sam’ll be okay, ‘cause he has Dean, but sometimes he thinks Dean needs someone to keep him safe too.

He kind of wants to curl up and fall asleep on Dean, ‘cause the window is cold and uncomfortable to lean against, but Dean’ll call him a baby. So he pulls his knees up to his chest and lays his head on those, already forgetting about staying up ‘til the sunrise in favor of sleepily wondering whether or not Pastor Jim is going to make those cookies he likes, the ones with the coconut in them.

Sam wakes up pressed against Dean anyway, though he doesn’t remember moving. Dean doesn’t call him a baby, but he is shaking his elbow and saying, “Sammy. Sammy, wake up.” The bus is all lit up, inside and out. They’re not moving anymore. The garage here looks a lot like the one they left in Indiana, except it smells worse, all exhaust and gasoline. But this one is better, because Pastor Jim is here, standing on the sidewalk with his hands in his pockets.

Pastor Jim laughs when Sam runs up to plaster him with a hug. Then he says, “You’re getting taller. I think you might outgrow your brother yet.”

Sam grins sleepily. “Nuh-uh. Dean’s, like—“ he waves his arms above his head. “Way tall.”

Dean has to shuffle his backpack and the duffel bag to give Pastor Jim a hug. Except it’s not a real hug; Dean only gives real hugs to Sam, everyone else gets half-hugs. But he gives Pastor Jim a half-hug, and Pastor Jim takes the duffel bag off his shoulder so that he’s only carrying his backpack.  
  
“Have you heard from our dad yet?” Dean asks.

He shakes his head. “Not yet, but I do have Bobby Singer pestering an unfortunate desk clerk once an hour in your honor. How was the ride?”

“It was long,” Sam says, even though he can’t remember most of it, just the really boring parts where he was awake.

Pastor Jim laughs. “Well, we’re halfway there. Are you hungry?”

Sam's five seconds of horror at the concept of 'halfway there' are derailed by the idea of food. He doesn't answer, though; he looks at Dean. He’s always hungry, but if Dean isn’t then he isn’t.

Dean says, “I could eat.”  
  
Dean says that to Dad sometimes, too, when Dad asks if they’re hungry. Sometimes it makes Dad laugh. It never makes Dad laugh when Sam says it, but sometimes he says he’s _starving_ , and that makes Dad laugh a lot, and Dean never says he’s starving, so it’s okay if that’s Dean’s thing, ‘cause Sam has his own thing, too.

Pastor Jim looks amused. He always looks amused, actually, but Sam likes to think mostly when they’re around, ‘cause he likes Pastor Jim and he thinks Pastor Jim likes them, too. They start walking toward the street. “Well, the city is ours. What would you like? There’s pizza, burgers—“

“Burgers,” Sam says longingly. There’s snow crusted on the edges of the sidewalk; he kicks at a piece, but it’s frozen hard, and his sneakers just scuff off the ice. “I could eat a whole cow.”

“Alright, so one vote for a whole cow.” Sam giggles at that, while Pastor Jim says, “Dean?”

“Burgers sounds good to me.”

“It’s decided, then.” Pastor Jim puts their stuff in the back of his truck and covers it with a tarp. Pastor Jim says it’s too cold for walking, so they pile into the truck and drive the 10 minutes to the restaurant. The truck’s still warm and it smells like the herbs and stuff that Pastor Jim keeps in his study. Sam almost starts dozing again, but his stomach’s growling too loud now that there’s the possibility of real food, not just stale old pretzels that Dean got out of the bus station vending machine.

Dean orders a whole adult burger at the restaurant. Sam just gets the kid-sized one, and Pastor Jim gets a cup of coffee that smells even worse than the stuff Dad gets from gas stations sometimes. After the waitress takes their orders and stuff Pastor Jim asks Dean, “Can you tell me a bit more about what happened?” He’s real quiet when he says it, so Sam gets quiet, too.

For a while Dean just pushes his silverware around on the table instead of answering. Dad yells at Sam whenever he does that, but Pastor Jim doesn’t say anything to Dean, just waits.  
  
Finally, Dean says, “He stopped me on the sidewalk. An older kid—a high schooler. He said something, I don’t remember what, but he called me by my name. We didn’t use our real name. Dad said we’d be going as the Morgans, ‘cause last time we registered my gym teacher started asking questions. But anyway, he said— I don’t know what he said.  
  
“I threw a brick at him, and it hit him, and I probably shouldn’t have done that. And he fell down. But he was in the room before I got there. And I ran, I don’t see how— And he was in the room with Sammy, and then- he was just-- gone again. So I grabbed everything and got out. I tried to call Dad, but he didn’t answer. I didn’t know what else to do.”  
  
Dean’s brow wrinkles. He stares really hard at the table and pushes the spoon around a bit more, but not like he’s making shapes, just pushing.

Pastor Jim looks confused. “He didn’t follow you from the room?”

“No, he was just—” He shakes his head. “I opened the door and started towards Sammy, and- he left.”  
  
His face is hidden as he says it, but afterward he looks up and gives Sam a bright smile. “Nobody messes with the Winchester men. Right, Sammy?”

Sam smiles back. “Well, duh.”

Pastor Jim’s still looking like Dad does, when he’s looking over all his papers and stuff that Sam’s not allowed to read. “You say he was in the room with Sam by the time you arrived?”

“I didn’t open the door or anything,” Sam says before Dean can answer, because he knows little kids do that kind of thing but he isn’t that stupid. But then he hesitates, looking at Dean. Little kids make up stories about people appearing, too.

“Yeah. Door was locked, windows shut, but he was standing there.”

Pastor Jim’s looking at Sam, now. “Did he say anything to you?”

Sam shakes his head. “I was reading my book and I heard Dean unlocking the door and when I looked up there was the guy in the middle of the room. He didn’t say anything, he just kinda-- looked. But I didn’t open the door, and I heard Dean lock it behind him when he left, and I didn’t see him walk in or crawl through the window or anything. He just, he kind of--”

“Appeared?”

Sam nods. It sounds better coming from Pastor Jim. More adult and real and stuff.

“But his face was hurt, so it wasn’t like he was imaginary,” Sam explains. “Dean really got him with a brick.” Something that Sam still thinks is so cool, even if Dean seems kinda worried about it.

“I believe you,” Pastor Jim says, and takes a sip of his coffee. “Well. I’m not quite sure what to make of this. But you did the right thing, leaving.” He goes quiet, thinking again.

Dean yawns so hard that he vibrates, and it makes the silverware rattle on the table. Dean is like a hippopotamus: his mouth is huge, Sam can see all his teeth. He opens his own mouth to see if it’s bigger than Dean’s, ‘cause Dean always says he’s got a big mouth. Dean finishes yawing and blinks down at Sam like he’s the hippopotamus, and then Dean sticks his finger in Sam’s mouth. In his mouth! Sam screeches in astonishment and delight and asks Dean to do it again, please, please, he’ll open really wide, but Pastor Jim is making shushing noises and Dean just tells him to be quiet.

The waitress brings them paper mats and crayons, and Dean gives his to Sam, so he draws a bus and puts his face and Dean’s in the window and other people and he draws Pastor Jim’s truck with Pastor Jim in it and the car even though Dad’s not here. He has to draw it in purple because there is no black, though. And he tells Pastor Jim all about the people on the bus and what they were wearing and stuff, and after they get their burgers Sam draws a hippopotamus and puts Dean’s hair on it and laughs while he’s waiting for them to finish eating.

Sam gets to sit between Pastor Jim and Dean on the way to his house, and he thinks he must fall asleep. He wakes up later and Dean and Pastor Jim are talking in really quiet voices about the guy in their motel room. Sam pretends to be asleep, ‘cause Dean’s put one of his arms around Sam’s back and is letting him sleep against his side, and he thinks Dean might make him sit up if he knew he were awake. But the things they’re saying don’t make any sense. Dean is talking about what color the guy’s eyes were and what he smelled like, and Pastor Jim asks about his teeth.  
  
The next time he wakes up, Dean is asleep half on top of Sam and the truck is stopped in Pastor Jim’s driveway. Pastor Jim’s got the passenger door open, and when he notices that Sam’s awake he asks him to help shift Dean closer. Sam’s afraid that Dean’s going to fall right out of the truck, but instead Pastor Jim picks him up and carries him into the house. Sam doesn’t know how he does it, ‘cause Dean is really heavy. He would know.

Sam thinks about trying to be helpful and bring the bags in, but the yard’s all dark and the truck’s making weird clanky, drippy noises that he doesn’t like. He jumps down from the cab and follows Pastor Jim instead, walking real quiet on the gravel so he doesn’t wake Dean. Pastor Jim puts Dean upstairs, in the room where they always sleep. When he comes back down Sam goes outside with him to get the bags, and Pastor Jim lets him carry the duffel and his backpack all the way inside. He has to let Pastor Jim carry the duffel up the stairs, though.

Pastor Jim makes sure Sam knows where his pajamas and toothbrush and stuff are, and then he says goodnight. He looks really tired, but he goes downstairs instead of down the hall to his bedroom. Sam brushes his teeth and puts on his pajamas, and when he comes back out he can hear Pastor Jim talking to someone on the phone. Sometimes he can hear what Pastor Jim says if he sits at the top of the stairs, but Pastor Jim’s talking all low and Sam’s too tired to understand it. After a few seconds of trying he gives up and goes down the hall and crawls into bed.

He says goodnight real quiet to Dean, because he forgot to before. He remembers then that he didn’t get to stay awake until sunrise, but then he realizes Dean didn’t, either, so he decides it’s okay and goes to sleep anyway.

 

 

 END CHAPTER ONE


	2. Ten Years Gone

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The last note. Contact. A child.

“Go _home_ ,” the waitress admonishes one last time, and Castiel is out the door.

March night air sinks its teeth through the fabric of his sweater, but it’s a distant sensation. He steps into the alcove of the adjacent store and bears his shoulders against the solidity of the brick wall.

He still feels disconnected, out of sync with the flesh and bones and time he’s supposed to be residing in. He doesn’t even recognize the alignment of the stars overhead. What few are to be seen in a city such as this.

It’s the vessel. The proportions are different, even the dress. He fiddles again with the hood, pulling it high to mimic as he has seen others wear these sweaters, but he's just as soon tugging it off again. Moreover, he is inhabiting an occupied vessel for the first time in years. Even at rest, Jimmy Novak’s soul is a cacophony compared to the empty silence he’s come to know.

Every time he catches his reflection he is surprised by the youth staring back at him, as surprised as he was by Dean.

Too far. He’d meant to come back days, hours even but— two decades. Nearly two decades. How had he misjudged so badly?

The neon light that had advertised the diner as OPEN darkens, but there are still two customers within. They’re the two Castiel is waiting for.

While they close their tab, he reaches into his back pocket and removes the slip of paper resting there.

He runs a hand over the paper’s folded edges. It’s more parchment than paper, in truth. Thick stock, and of a surprisingly fine quality. The majority of it is blank. There are only two words, scribbled in the middle of the page, amongst a dozen flecks of red. The red is dried now, soaked in, as much a part of the parchment as those two words.

Why did Dean have this on him? Castiel never saw him write on anything besides greasy fast food napkins, or the margins of Sam’s neatly-kept notebooks.

But the slanting scrawl of those two words is unmistakable. Like most things in his life, Dean wrote in a style of controlled chaos.

( _Cas—_ )

The diner door opens to eject its last customers. Castiel carefully folds the parchment on its lines and returns it to his pocket.

A man sways by, arm slung low over the hips of a woman that is not dressed appropriately for the chill. He murmurs some slurred suggestion; the woman laughs, a noise too loud to be sincere.

Castiel pushes away from the alcove and steps towards them. As the man shrugs off his coat to place around the prostitute, Castiel’s hand seeks the pocket he’d seen the man tuck his wallet into.

The prostitute has already been paid, and the man will likely not note his wallet’s absence until he is well into the throes of a morning hangover. No one will come out short in tonight’s exchange.

There’s still $70 remaining within the wallet, in addition to a credit card. He knows not to use the credit card.

 _Traceable_ , parrots an old memory, in a dead friend’s voice. _Stolen credit cards lead to security cameras, lead to cops, lead to Feds--_

He stutters to a stop, fingers running over the raised print of the card.

He flicks the card into the gutter and keeps walking. There’s a Greyhound station, not far. In a distant corner of Minnesota, this world’s Dean has stopped running.

And he— he cannot.

 

 

Dean fell asleep watching the A-Team. He knows, because he can hear the TV still playing.

Pastor Jim made them chocolate chip pancakes when they woke up. Then he took them out to buy Sam a new pair of sneakers and Dean a new Walkman - even though Dean told him he didn’t need one, and they didn’t have money to pay him back - and Sam got a haircut and they got to pick out a pint of ice cream, each, at the store. Jim made real mac ‘n cheese for dinner, not the stuff out of a box, and Sam was in raptures over it the whole damn time. And after dessert Sam took his bath, and made Dean read to him out of one of his Magic Tree House books that was still in his backpack when they left town.

Uncle Bobby was there when Dean came back down. He said hi, said he was dropping by on his way back from a case. After a little talk about baseball and some questions about Dad, Jim ushered Uncle Bobby and his coffee towards the study and closed the door. Dean had stood in the kitchen for a while, listening to Bobby’s grumbling, and the lighter, smoother cadence of Jim’s answers. They’re not arguing. But he’s not just dropping by. Dean’s not dumb. He’d hoped Bobby was here to look for Dad.

Or maybe to look for the kid.

Either way, he couldn’t stand in the kitchen forever - Pastor Jim wasn’t dumb, either - so he got a glass of water, sat down in the den and turned on the A-Team. He hadn’t intended to fall asleep. But now he’s back in that hazy place between dreams and waking, and he can hear the credits rolling past, and the low rumble of Uncle Bobby’s voice somewhere far off.

He reaches for the remote, one bleary eye cracked, and freezes.

There’s someone standing over him.

He opens his eyes, and there’s the guy. The guy from Fort Wayne, the one Dean had thrown a brick at, the one that’d stepped out of existence like it was nothing. He’s leaning over real close, and he’s got one hand out to Dean’s shoulder kind of like Dad does, sometimes, when he’s trying to wake Dean up without startling him.

It scares Dean so bad he wants to be sick.

He jerks away, scrambling up the back of the armchair in his haste. He’s still in Pastor Jim’s house, there’s still distant noise on the TV and warm light spilling under the study door, but here’s the guy, just standing in the middle of the living room with the eleven o’ clock news running in the background. There’s no one around: Sam’s asleep, the study door is closed, just Dean and the stranger. He’s closer than anyone’s supposed to get, ever; Dad taught him so.

Suddenly everything Dad taught him means _nothing_.

The stranger doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t even breathe. All he does is pull his hand back, just a little. Then Dean’s stomach lurches as the chair hits its tipping point and passes it. Cold fingers grab his wrist in a crushing grip. The chair hits the floor with a loud thump, leaving Dean suspended, half-upright, with his weight supported only by the guy’s cold, bony grip on his wrist and an awful wrenching pressure on his shoulder.

He hangs there: too shocked to move or push away or pick up his feet. It’s quiet. Dean’s breathing too loud in his head, almost as loud as the frantic drumming in his chest.

Then Pastor Jim calls out a question. “Dean?”

“Let me go,” Dean breathes, and then more panicked, “Let me _go_.” He doesn’t even think to use any of the disarming techniques Dad taught him. He pushes at the hand like it were a watch he could slide off. There are white marks all around where the fingers are gripping his skin. He pushes, and then tries to twist his arm free.

The study door slides open.

“Let me go,” Dean says again, twisting and contorting in the grip, but Uncle Bobby is crossing the floor with a rapid rhythm of heavy boot steps.

The kid’s shoes squeak on the floor; cold fingers curl into the collar of Dean’s shirt, and then the world lurches out from under him.

++++

Castiel lands in the forest a quarter-mile west. Before he’s folded his wings he’s releasing his grip on Dean and reaching for the sword that still isn’t there.

He can see the gaping hole where he’s just dragged them through the fabric of space, lined with his grace. Damn. _Damn._ It was a short flight. Sometimes Armisael’s unit doesn’t catch such small tears, but he shouldn’t have risked it. Still, Singer had been about to raise a gun on him, and — _damn._

He watches the black trunks of the trees in the moonlight, listening on all planes for the sibilant noise of an angel’s arrival.

The only sound is Dean, scrabbling in the snow and ice, pushing to his feet. He moves to run, but the ice crust is thin so late in the season, and he crashes through to the powder and leaf litter below.

Castiel allows him to wallow until he is certain that they are alone. Nothing moves; the angels seem to have missed his short flight.

Dean breathes in short pants, scanning the forest in rapid tics of motion. “Uncle Bobby? _Uncle Bobby_!?”

Castiel puts his hands on Dean’s shoulders, trying to draw his attention away from the empty forest. “Dean, you have to listen to me.”

Dean ducks from beneath his hand, this time to begin a faltering, desperate sprint in the opposite direction. Castiel lunges to intercept him, the both of them slipping in the slick snow. This time he takes firm hold of Dean’s shoulders.

“Dean, listen. I just need you to listen. You needn’t be afraid of me.”

He realizes as soon as he says it that that’s what this is: Dean is afraid. Of him.

He is surprised by this.

Dean’s breathing in large, wet gasps; he sags forward, head hanging in resignation. The grip on Dean’s arms has caused his shirt sleeves to pull up, and Castiel has a clear view of the purpling bruise on his wrist, made in the shape of Jimmy Novak’s hand.

Castiel relaxes his hold. He doesn’t want to cause any more damage than he already has.

In that moment, Dean lashes out with a fist.

The blow takes Castiel against the jaw. It does little damage to him, but in his distraction he neglects to be pliant. It must hurt. Castiel can hear the bones in Dean’s hand make brittle, cracking sounds. But Dean only pulls back his hand in blinking, wide-eyed surprise.

“Dean—” Castiel begins, uncertain. Dean’s eyes well and spill over with thick tears, but still with that look of astonishment. He’s crying as a child would. Because he _is_ a child. Standing in pajamas, socked feet sinking into the snow.

For the first time since his arrival in this place and time, Castiel is stunned to stillness.

He swallows, tries to pry out the brief speech that had been sitting half-formed at the back of his mind.

He begins: “I—” and stops.

Another halting start: “I came here to warn you. In nineteen years, there’s going to be-- you’re going to be surrounded, and I--”

_I won’t be there, you’ll think I’m gone, but I’m not, I’ll come, I’ll be there, so please, don’t—_

_Don’t._

He doesn’t say any of it, not any of it that could matter. There’s an empty face staring up at him, and Castiel knows now that his words are meaningless here. He’s come back too far. He’s come back for nothing.

Dean blinks again, and more tears run down his face.

“Please let me go.” His voice is quiet. He wavers on the longer vowels. “I want to go home.”

Slowly, Castiel straightens up. “Of course.”

He doesn’t consider Armisael when he takes flight a second time.

He doesn’t care if they notice.

Bobby Singer and the pastor are gone. The door is thrown carelessly open. He sets Dean down in the middle of the room and falters, one second, two, thinking he should do something more.

He reaches into his pocket, removing a crumpled $5 bill. It isn’t the one that Dean dropped on an Indiana sidewalk; he’d spent that one on bus fare. But he places the bill on the coffee table, setting a glass of water on its edge to keep the breeze from blowing it away.

He takes a final glance at Dean: standing shell-shocked, his injured hand cradled in the other, tears shining on his face. Then Castiel goes.

 

 

END CHAPTER 2


	3. White Noise

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The aftermath. Castiel runs. A stolen page. The price of a vessel.

It’s quiet for a while.

Then Uncle Bobby is there. He’s saying lots of things, so that the silence is filled with noise. He drops down beside Dean, because Dean’s sitting on his knees in the middle of the floor. Uncle Bobby puts his hands on Dean’s face, on his shoulders, skims them over the hand that’s still throbbing, and goes back to his face.

Bobby’s thumbs sweep over Dean’s cheeks, and then slowly tilt his face up so they’re properly facing each other.

“Can you hear me, Dean? Are you okay?”

Dean’s voice is quiet, small, even in his head: “I want to go home.”

Uncle Bobby’s quiet, too, for a moment, and then he says, “Okay. Okay, we’re gonna get you to your dad. Okay?”

“No.” Dean can feel the tears welling around his eyes again, and they splash down his face as soon as he blinks. “No, I want to go _home_. I want to _go home_.”

His voice gets warbly and indistinguishable even to his own ears, and hearing himself makes him cry harder—cry in earnest, with tears everywhere and his face crumpled up. Uncle Bobby pulls him close to his chest so that Dean’s face is pressed against the flannel of his shirt, and he can’t help it, it all comes pouring out of him. His good hand fists in Bobby’s shirt and he opens his mouth but all that comes out are long, silent sobs and hitching breaths. He stutters and gasps and cries and cries, and Uncle Bobby doesn’t call him a baby, he just hangs on, which makes Dean cry more, and it’ll never stop, he’ll just cry forever.

He wants his _dad_ and he wants his _mom_ and he wants to be back at the house in Lawrence before anything happened, with the rocking chair and the scratchy blue blanket that mom would wrap him up in and sing to him whenever he was feeling sick. He wants to go _home_ , and it fills his head so much he thinks he might burst with wanting it.

Dean cries and cries and there’s nobody to stop him, Uncle Bobby just pats his back and says _hey, hey_ like Mom used to say _hush_. After a while Bobby picks him up as though Dean were as little as Sammy and carries him out of Jim’s house to the truck. He doesn’t even get mad when there’s a big snot stain in his shirt where Dean’s face was pressed; he just helps Dean get buckled in and then wraps him in his jacket.

Pastor Jim is there, silhouetted in the headlights of his old pickup. He hands Bobby Dean’s backpack; they confer awhile, and Dean tries to stop crying, but it only makes the hitching sobs worse. He swipes at the tears with his sleeve and sniffles.

Then Jim’s in front of him, wrapping a gentle arm around his shoulders in a brief hug. Dean stares at the radio set into the dash. He can feel how he’s puffy and red-faced, and he doesn’t want Pastor Jim seeing him like that. It’s embarrassing.

Pastor Jim doesn’t make him turn towards him. “Bobby’s going to take you to the hospital.”

Dean forces one choked question: “What about Sam?”

Jim points a thumb over his shoulder, towards his truck. “He’s fine. He’s still sleeping. We’re going to split ways for a few days; see if this thing surfaces again.”

See if it follows him again.

“Did you call Dad?” Dean croaks.

“I left a message.”

“Sam’s gonna be upset,” he says. “We’re not supposed to split up.”

“He’ll be alright. It’s a few days at most. Once I hear from your dad, we’ll get back together.”

Dean just nods along to the hot rhythm of pain beating in his hand. He’s kind of glad; glad that Sam’s asleep. Glad he doesn’t have to tell him why he’s going away. ‘Cause he can’t keep him safe.

Jim passes a hand through Dean’s hair and says, “It’ll be okay.”

As the door closes and Jim starts pulling away, Bobby asks: “You ever been to a town called Pontiac?”

Dean doesn’t understand, at first. But Bobby adds, “The kid’s sweatshirt,” and Dean realizes that’s what it had said. Pontiac Dive.

Dean shakes his head, and Bobby nods. Dean looks out the window. Skeleton trees scratch by, dragging on a black winter sky. At the end of the drive, Pastor Jim turns left, and they turn right. If Sam were awake he’d wave. He always waves, big exaggerated swipes of both arms like he’s trying to hail a cab or something. Dean wouldn’tve waved back. He doesn’t wave when people leave.

Sam always says that’s why he waves so much. He’s waving extra hard for both of them.

 

 

  
After Blue Earth - after Dean - Castiel tears blindly across the earth.

He wants to prise apart air and space and time with his wings, he wants to fly until he shakes apart, he wants -

He wants to be _away_ from here.

From flesh and blood and empty obligations.

But such thoughtless acts always carry a cost.

His feet have just touched down to the soft pine bedding of the Rockies when he feels his brothers rippling through the evergreens, searching. He hesitates as they draw closer, closer. He considers his bare hands, curled into tight fists, and thinks of Arathon. He remembers the sharp smell of hospital astringents.

Common sense overrules.

As the first angel is stepping down behind him, he takes flight.

He flees by wing, at first, following short skips from one oppressing throng of humanity to the next: the deafening rhythm of a Denver night club, the sullen soured air of an Omaha bar. Humans are close and _loud_ and confusing, to the angels, to him.

When his wings fail him in Chicago - he doesn’t know what the place is, but it’s loud and dark and reeks of sweat - he continues by foot. He races the fetid corridors of Chicago’s night district, weaving from one crowded place to the next. The crowds thin as the night drags on. When the crowds are gone, he runs alone.

There’s nothing behind him, or ahead of him. He keeps running.

He doesn’t stop running until his legs threaten to give beneath him.

He stumbles his last steps: across an empty park plaza and up stone stairs, until he is pressing his hands to the cold plinth of a statue.

A bronzed human rests upon a plain throne, lit from below by the glare of electric lights. He sits stiff-backed and heavy of expression, one hand fisted tightly at his knee.

Castiel stumbles to the shadows of the statue’s back, where a screen of naked trees and a low stone wall offer some form of cover.

The sky is just beginning to light with the dove gray of dawn. He can see where his panting cuts the air in silver clouds. His breath doesn’t slow. It builds, faster, faster.

He makes himself small. He presses shaking hands into hair that’s longer than he remembered, feeling the dig of fingernails into skin he doesn’t fit properly within.

He’s done nothing to change it. Nothing. His grace is withering within him and here he is, curled into the shadows, hiding like a rat.

Castiel twists and strikes the plinth of the statue with an open hand, and when that does not satisfy he balls a fist and strikes again. Again, _again_ , until the reverberations shake through bone and gristle and down into his core.

The echo of a low, thunderous snap stops him.

There’s a crack running through the granite, cutting a narrow line from its base to the metal of the statue above. At its center is the blooded imprint of his fist.

He wraps up bleeding knuckles with his good hand. It doesn’t feel like anything.

“I’m not sure what you expected,” a woman’s voice drawls at his back. “You know it doesn’t work this way.”

Castiel twists around, surging to his full height. He just as soon has to sway back and press a hand to the statue to steady himself.

There’s a woman sitting on the granite wall. She’s older, and of simple dress. The stereotypical American housewife, a decade past her prime. Sagging face, graying hair, and clothing that hangs in comfortable folds of cotton.

Except it is not a woman.

Castiel has seen the Three Fates embodied twice: once on the day of Lucifer’s fall, and once during the razing of Sodom and Gomorrah. Both sightings had been from afar and only fleeting.

This one is close enough that her true name is plain to him. He knows her, as she no doubt knows him; she is Lachesis. The One Who Measures.

She sees his recognition, and does not bother to introduce herself. Instead, she flips through a clipboard that is fit to burst with tightly-clamped scraps of paper. “This is a defining day in Dean Winchester’s life. You’re the reason why he sleeps with a knife under his pillow. And the knuckles of his right hand are still slightly misshapen, even nineteen years later. Incidentally, this is also what prompts Sam Winchester to suspect that paranormal entities are real. He’ll coerce the truth from his brother in—” she checks her watch “—nine months, seven days, seven hours and thirteen minutes.”

“And it all ends the same,” Castiel answers flatly. Because that is the way it works.

She glances up. “If it makes you feel better, he never realized that it was you.”

What has happened, must happen.

If Castiel’s presence is what defined this day, then the events that led him to come here, to blindly throw himself into the past, must happen.

He will always come back.

He will always end up here. With nothing to return to.

And that thought, that’s the one that curdles within him into a blind wrath.

“It can change. I can _change_ it,” Castiel shouts, with all the fury and certainty of his making; even as the words ring empty in his own head. “ _You_ won’t let it.”

Lachesis stares at him. She appears unimpressed. But she also looks curious.

She lifts the clipboard from her lap to flash the words inscribed there: Book of Life. “These pages lock the future into its path. _I_ just take the dictations. But would you like to see something interesting?”

Castiel says nothing. He does not trust his tongue to be civil.

Lachesis turns pages of the clipboard, murmuring the Enochian alphabet as she goes. At last she stops with a muttered, “Ah,” and flips the clipboard towards Castiel. When he does not immediately move closer, she clears her throat impatiently.

Slowly, he steps towards her.

At the top of the page, his name—his true name—is written in elegant script. Beneath that is a recounting of his actions from his creation to the present. Lachesis turns the pages quickly, so that he only catches brief glances of distant memories. But on the last page, detailing their present encounter, the narrative stops. The next page has been torn free.

Castiel falls back, caught between his lingering wrath and a fresh bloom of confusion.

He settles for an aggressive shake of his head. “I don’t understand.”

Again, Lachesis stares at him. This time in impatience. “You have it, now. You might as well use it.”

He doesn’t understand what she means. Not at first. But as she studies him with an aggrieved expression he begins to understand.

Slowly, he removes the folded paper from his back pocket.

It’s a good quality parchment. Thick stock. An odd choice, for Dean Winchester.

Across its upper edge is a ragged tear.

Lachesis keeps her eyes turned coyly away from the stolen page of Fate in Castiel’s hand. “You’re not here, Castiel. I have no record of you from this moment on, until—” she flips another page “—6:13 pm on March 24th. Wherever you go, whatever you choose to do, it seems to be entirely outside my jurisdiction. Curious, isn’t it?”

“I don’t understand,” he echoes. “Why would you give this to me?”

Lachesis regards Castiel sternly. “This isn’t _my_ doing. I have superiors to answer to.”

It could be a lie. Her expression is inscrutable.

He studies her more closely in the weak dawn light. “What interest do you have in this?”

Lachesis smooths the curling pages of her Book back into place and rises to her feet. She examines the damage done to the memorial with a critical eye, but she never answers his question. “You always come here,” she comments instead. She turns her gaze back to him. “But wherever you go now, you make your own future. Nothing is certain anymore.” Folding the clipboard back under her arm, she gives a small wave of farewell and steps out of Castiel’s perception.

He is left with nothing to orient himself by.

Time is… fluid. He said so himself to Dean, and it’s still the most apt description of his angelic perception of it. Like a river, it will carry everything along its fated course, angel and man alike. There may be minute deviations, but the currents will always tug every event, every being back towards--

Towards what? That is the problem.

There are points in time by which he can navigate. He doesn’t necessarily know the what, or where of each notable marker, but he knows the when of each point relative to its neighbors Some might prove significant to him, some will always remain nonspecific.

The importance is the relation: he knows how they are arranged, like the fixed constellations of stars in a familiar sky. He knows - he knew - where to direct himself, to move not just between spaces, but between times.

Up until now, he thought he knew the sky overhead.

But he can see now that he’s looking at an entirely different constellation.

All of those points, those faceless events, are shifted. Some have rearranged, or maybe disappeared altogether, but it's all _different_. He has nothing familiar around which to orient himself. Not until a single vague reference point on March 24th.

He is lost, in a way he’s never been before.

He looks to the parchment still held in numb fingers. Words have begun to twine into existence on the top of the page, scripted in blunt Enochian: _He studies the stars in confusion._

It must be some cosmic joke, giving this to him, an angel, spun into creation to enforce the will of God.

Nonetheless, Dean Winchester died with a page of Fate’s book in his hand, and Castiel had been the one to pick it up.

On one side, two words were scrawled: _I’m sorry._

And now— now, Castiel has to shape his answer.

 

 

The letter has found its way back into her hands.

Anna Novak runs her fingers along its frayed edges. It’s a heavy envelope, with the college seal pressed into the front. The weight, that’s a good sign. It’s likely filled to burst with brochures and forms and that first letter, the one with raised ink printed on thick stock, the one that says _Welcome to the University of Chicago._

Class of 1995. Jimmy’s supposed to be the Class of 1995. He’ll go into marketing, like his father, and have a good life. When he comes back.

The detectives have gone for the day, and in their place is a room heavy with silence. She slides her fingers over the envelope’s edges - well-worn, now, but still not open, not yet.

The letter came two days ago. She gave quite a bit of thought to where to put it. Slyly tucked into the usual mail bin by the door, maybe, or dropped on top of the shoe rack for when he first stumbled in the door. After some debate, she’d leaned it up against Jimmy’s empty glass on the kitchen table. A welcome dinner surprise.

After everything, she’d found the letter again. After the air had stopped humming. After Paul had guided her bleeding feet into her shoes, to protect against any more of the glass from every broken light fixture scattered across the floor.

The dinner glasses were broken, too. But there the letter had been, lying amongst shards that curved like teeth in the dark.

She sets the envelope down on couch cushions that still reek of chlorine.

Two days ago her son had thrown his backpack on the entryway floor and sprawled across the couch in a ritual a thousand times repeated. She’d yelled at him from the kitchen: _Get your sneakers off my couch._ He’d grunted some muffled affirmation but he probably hadn’t, because the sneakers - well worn, his favorite pair - were gone too.

She’d gone back to cooking dinner. How long? She doesn’t know. The detectives asked, again and again, and it’s always the same answer: she doesn’t know. She remembers cracking spaghetti into boiling water. She remembers pausing with her hand on the lid, watching the goosebumps rising on her arms. She remembers every light fixture in the house shattering in a shower of blinding sparks. She found glass for hours after, in her hair, on her skin, glittering.

She remembers glass popping beneath her feet as she ran towards the living room.

She remembers an empty room and a closed door and cracked glass rattling in the windowpanes. She remembers hearing herself - a distant, empty thing - screaming for her son.

And now, her house follows cycles of chaos and quiet. Officers and detectives and relatives and church friends all offering questions and theories and empty rationales. Maybe he just ran away; maybe she never heard him come in at all, had she seen him? No, she hadn’t looked, she hadn’t _needed_ to look, she knew what she would see: her son, _her son_ , sprawled across the couch after another afternoon dive practice. Wet hair pressed into the cushions and sneakers dirty with the salt and ice of March dangling over the couch arm. That’s what she would have seen, before her world fractured apart.

She should’ve looked. She should’ve seen him one more time.

He’s going to the University of Chicago. He’s going to be the Class of 1995.

“Anne?”

She looks up, and Paul is standing in front of her, the coffee table a comfortable buffer between them. There’s grease on his hands. The car is his escape from the house’s quiet.

There’s a distant noise. The steady rapping of someone knocking at the front door. The doorbell doesn’t work anymore.

“They’ve been knocking for awhile,” Paul says. He looks at the envelope on the couch and says nothing, just flicks tired eyes back to her face. “Are you—”

The knock comes again, insistent.

“I’ll go get it,” Paul says, and moves away.

Anne rises to her feet and crosses the room, tucking the envelope back into the mail receptacle hanging just past the front doorway. It should be within easy reach. Jimmy will want to open it when he gets home.

“Look, we don’t need any more reporters—” Paul is explaining.

A woman’s voice interrupts in silky tones. “Oh, no, no. You’ve got me all wrong.”

The air curdles, and lurches. Anna watches on some surreal movie screen as her husband flies the length of the hallway. He hits the doorway with the sharp snap of shattering wood and falls to the floor.

A small noise escapes her throat, and her hand leaps to her mouth to stifle it.

Heels tap a rhythm sharp as gunfire on the hardwood.

Paul isn’t getting up.

A woman with violent red hair and skin pale as milk steps into the living room doorway, looking around the room with a tight smile. The air around her sours with the sickly-sweet taste of meat rotting in the sun.

She sets her gaze upon Anne, and her smile widens to show bright teeth. Her eyes flood with rich, tarry black. “I hear you’ve had an unusual visitor, honey. Please.” She gestures demurely towards the couch. “Tell me all about it.”

 

END ACT ONE


	4. devil's spoke

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> where it began. | gone fishing. | john.

TEAM FREE WILL SAGA  
ACT II

 

 

It’s early afternoon when Castiel steps down into the depths of the sullied convent. Little sunlight follows him here. He waits for human eyes to adjust, breathes the sour air.

There isn’t much, under the shadows. Cracked stone and encroaching vines that wither and curl before they can reach too far into this poisonous place. At the end of the corridor, dark oak doors hang heavy on rusting hinges. They are tightly shut. They aren’t set to open again for seventeen years. He’s never seen what’s beyond them, but he needn’t.

This is where the angels lost. This is where the war began.

He has two weeks off of the Fates’ books, two weeks to do whatever has to be done. He came here to save Dean – Dean, who is unable to listen to what he has to say - but that doesn’t matter now. It isn’t just about Dean, anymore. He could stop it all. The seals. Lucifer’s rise. The war. Sam.

Dean.

He presses a hand to the rotting wood, and feels his skin burn with the unholiness on the other side.

All he has to do is stop it.

He pulls his hand away. His fingers’ imprint remains, a charred scar on an otherwise unblemished door. He may not be much of an angel these days, but he can’t enter here. It is purely profane. That, the demons have guaranteed.

No; one demon. Azazel.

Castiel flexes the singed skin of his palm, mulling over the pain. Lucifer’s rise required Lilith’s death, but Lilith had to rise to Earth in order to fall. Heaven might have turned a blind eye towards the start of this war, but Azazel was the one moving amongst the humans, manipulating everything towards this inevitability.

The Winchesters’ yellow-eyed demon. It’s as good a start as any.

All he needs is a means of killing it.

 

The bench seat in Bobby’s pickup is long enough that Dean can lie down on it, if he tucks his knees up. The fabric underneath his cheek is rough, and smells like antiseptic. Or maybe he smells like antiseptic. His clothes and skin and hair smell like a hospital, even though they didn’t stay long. It’s everywhere. All over him.  
  
Uncle Bobby left the heat on, ‘cause Dean was cold when he got back inside. Bobby said that medication can do that, sometimes—make you cold. It makes you slow, and being slow makes you cold. Or maybe Dean was secretly a lizard man, and should he check? That’s the kind of thing that Sam would laugh about. He’d giggle, and cover his mouth with his hands, and try not to giggle but that would make him laugh harder. Lizard man. Reptile. He wants his dad.

Bobby says, “Gonna check in with Jim. You alright? Do you want to come with me?”  
  
Dean lifts his head a bit. They’re pulling up to a phone booth next to a run-down corner store. The parking lot’s mostly empty, so Uncle Bobby parks real close. But there’s no bench: nowhere for Dean to sit. He doesn’t feel like standing.  
  
He shakes his head.  
  
“Okay,” Bobby says, “But you poke your feet out whenever you like, or holler if you need me.”  
  
Dean stares at the radio embedded in the dashboard. Some of the buttons are missing. He reaches out with his good hand, feeling the worn edges of the existing buttons and the empty gaps in the faceplate where they’ve been chipped away. His bad hand aches in an abstract way, like it’s happening to someone else, and Dean shifts his arm so the cast is more comfortable.

This is not his first broken bone. The doctors said he can come up with an exciting story to tell his friends. They said climbing a mountain or taming a wild circus lion. Dean thinks, playing baseball. Sliding into second base, crushed his hand against the plate.  
  
“What position should I play?” he asks, and then realizes that Uncle Bobby’s already out of the truck and can’t hear him.  
  
He could be first baseman. Or maybe catcher? He could be a good catcher.  
  
He’ll ask Dad when he gets back. Dad would know. Dean remembers lying on his side on the couch, just like this, watching the Royals. Hometown pride is important, Dad said, you always root for the home team. And he would let Dean wear his ballcap.  
  
Dean wants his dad. Instead, he’s here.  
  
“Uncle Bobby, can you call my dad?” he calls out. His voice sounds small to his ears, and Bobby can’t hear him. “Uncle Bobby. Can you call my dad?”  
  
He lifts his head up again, so it’s resting against the seatback. Bobby is already on the phone, keeping one eye on the truck as he talks in small hand motions and a restless jig of his leg. Dean slides back down the seat. He tries to drink the cup of water that Uncle Bobby gave him as they were leaving the hospital, but he spills most of it on his shirt collar, and that make him more cold.

He huddles underneath Bobby’s jacket and waits.  
  
Dean doesn’t close his eyes—or at least he doesn’t think he does—but time passes and Bobby calls out to Dean that Sam’s asking for him, so he pushes out of the truck. He stumbles a little bit because he’s tired, so Bobby doesn’t go far, but he hands him the receiver.  
  
“Hey Sammy.”  
  
His tongue is kind of thick and awkward, and wants to slur all the sounds together. ‘ _S’mmy_.’

"Dean!" Sam practically shouts into the receiver, then pauses and continues in a stage whisper. "Were you sleepin'?"

“Nah, I’m just tired.” He sounds alright. And Bobby would have told him first, if anything had happened. “Are you giving Pastor Jim a hard time?”

"No," Sam announces. "We went to a lil' town like Blue Earth and got waffles and I ate a whole waffle all by myself and I'm never gonna eat _again_.” Sam stops, takes a breath. “He said you and Bobby are camping, but Dean, Dad said we’re not s’posed to split up—”

“It’s fine, Sammy. We went fishing, is all. You remember when we went fishing? This is just like that. You were really excited that time, remember? We had fun.”

He can see the face Sam’s making on the other end: all wrinkled nose and exaggerated little kid disgust. “It’s too cold to go fishing now.”

“Well, yeah, that’s why we went ourselves. You’re too little, you’d freeze right to your seat. We were up all night, and we got two live ones. Uncle Bobby said we’re gonna have a fish fry tonight, and tomorrow there’ll be a big picnic with all the fishers and then we’ll play some ball.”

He can hear Sam start in with, “But Dad said—” in the background, but Dean just keeps going, a slow and steady spill of words: “I’m thinking about playing catcher. What’d’ya say to that? Think I could be catcher?”

"You should be the pitcher!” Sam belts out. “The pitchers are the ones that get to do all the funny motions with their arms and legs."

“Have you seen Uncle Bobby’s arm? I bet he’s got a fastball that can’t be beat.”

"I bet you could throw _way_ faster than Uncle Bobby if you tried."

"Do you want me to tell him you said so?"

"Noooo," Sam whines.

Dean’s arm throbs with renewed vigor now that he’s standing up. He leans his forehead against the side of the phone booth and that helps a bit.  
  
“So what have you been up to, besides the waffle?”

"Pastor Jim's trying to teach me gin rummy. S'a funny name, isn't it? What's a gin rummy?"

“It doesn’t mean anything; it’s just a made up name.”

"Oh." He sounds disappointed, but then he rejoins with, "Maybe it was the name of the guy that made up the game. If I make up a game, can I name it after me? Or maybe you and me can make up a game together and we can call it the Dean an' Sam game. Or-- or Dean Sammy. See? Like gin rummy. That'd be cool, don'tcha think?"

“I don’t think it would be a very fair game, seeing as how I’d always win.”

He can hear the smartass shining through in Sam's tone. "Not if I write the rules so that I always win."

“Hey, which one of us is in charge here?”

“If it’s gonna be the Dean n’ Sammy game then I get half the rules. Otherwise it’s the Dean game, and that just sounds dumb.”

“Alright, alright.”  
  
Dean yawns so hard his jaw cracks.

"Are you gonna take a nap? If you're gonna cook fish and play baseball and stuff you should take a nap. When you're done with the picnic are you gonna come camp with us?"

“You’re camping too, huh?”

"Yeah-huh. This whoooole cabin, with two big rooms and a big fireplace." He drops to a whisper again. "I don't wanna sleep by myself, though. There’s nothing but woods around. I bet it gets really dark."

Dean drops his voice to a whisper, too. “I bet you could talk Pastor Jim into having a sleepover with you by the fireplace.”

“Yeah!” Sam answers, forgetting to be quiet. “Maybe we can make s’mores. If we make s’mores I’ll save you one, okay?”

“How ‘bout you eat it for me instead. No sense letting a good s’more go to waste.”

Sam sounds equally awed and horrified at the prospect. “I can’t eat two whole s’mores!”

“Oh, I don’t know. That mouth of yours is pretty big. What about Pastor Jim? He could eat it for me.”

“Pastor Jim couldn’t eat two whole s’mores,” Sam scoffs. There’s a shuffling noise while he turns away from the receiver. “Pastor Jim says he could eat _three_ whole s’mores,” he says, now sounding utterly mystified. “Maybe he can eat one for Bobby, too. When are you coming back?”

“A couple more days—it’s only ‘til Dad gets back. There’s still lots to do. We’ve got baseball tomorrow, remember, and then there’s hiking, and white-water rafting, and maybe we’ll even ride barrels over a waterfall.”

“But people die doing that! I saw a thing about Niagara Falls and people in barrels and everybody _died_ , Dean.”

“Really? ‘cause I think I saw Wile-E-Coyote try it, and he seemed to do okay…”

“But he blows up all the time. People don’t blow up, Dean! Please don’t go over a waterfall in a barrel? Me and Pastor Jim are gonna have to come fish you out and I’m not really good at fishing, all I ever caught was that turtle.”

“Okay, okay, I won’t if you say so. No waterfall barrel rides for me.”

“Okay. Are you gonna call tomorrow?”

“Yeah. You be good, okay? Do everything Pastor Jim asks, and don’t give him too much grief.”

“I’m always good! Say bye to Bobby for me.”

“I will. Can you put Pastor Jim back on?”

“Yeah. Bye Dean!” The other end drops off to shuffling and white noise. Pastor Jim comes on with a cheerful, “Hello.”

“Hi Pastor Jim.” Dean fiddles with the coin return slot again, and finds a grimy nickel.

“Hello, Dean. Doing alright?”

“I’m alright. I was wondering if you could do me a favor?”

“Of course.”

“Sam’s been wanting this, um— It’s a model plane thing. Like, it winds up with a rubber band and all. He’ll be able to tell you which one he wants. I haven’t been able to save up money for it, but I was wondering if you could get it for him, and I’ll pay you back later. I can mow the lawn and wash your car and stuff.”

“A washed car and we’ll call it a deal.”

“Thanks.” He lifts his head again, and blinks at the sunlight. He’s still nursing a bit of a headache. “Did you need to talk to Bobby?”

“We’re all set,” Jim answers. “Take care.”

Dean hangs up the receiver and drags his feet back to the truck.  
  
As soon as Bobby climbs in, he asks: “Did you call my dad?”

“We’re still trying.”

It’s just— It’s not—

Dean feels like something inside him is wailing. Maybe that’s just the headache.

“You said we would look for my dad.”

“We’re working on it. The first priority is keeping you safe, alright?”

“Okay.”  
  
He leans against the passenger door; the glass is cool and eases a bit of the tension in his head. But the wailing feeling goes on and on, like a twine of string winding tighter. He wraps the jacket around himself again, careful not to jostle the cast on his arm.  
  
“Okay,” he repeats.  
  
If he can’t go to Dad, at least he knows that Dad will soon be coming for him. Nothing will keep him away, once he finds out. Soon.

 

He doesn't hear the kid come in.

All he hears is a quiet voice saying, “John Winchester?”, and then he’s cracking one eye open to study a skinny kid standing at the closed door of his cell. He’s dwarfed under an ill-fitting jacket, pulled loosely over a gray sweatshirt. He can’t be more than, christ, 15?

“Got the wrong guy,” John answers. “If you’re looking for a Winchester, it must be the guy down there.” He jerks a thumb to the drunk snoring two beds down.

The kid gives the other prisoner a passing glance before returning his cool stare back to John. John doesn’t like it. A kid this young, sneaking around a police station at 3 in the goddamn morning, should not look this calm. Or say with such certainty, “I don’t think I do.”

Not that John has a damn thing on him to test the kid's humanity.

The kid fidgets. “I’ve been looking for you. I didn’t expect to find you in a place like this.” Another pause. “I wanted to ask you about something.”

John rises from his seat. “You’re not with the police.”

“No.” And this, this John has to contain a laugh at. The kid squares his bony shoulders and says: “I hunt, like you.”

“And how did a ‘hunter’ like you happen to come across me here, in a police station?”

“I heard you were in town a few days,” he answers. He glances towards the door, but something about the gesture is off. Mimed, almost. “Grave desecration isn’t that common of a charge,” he adds.

John crosses his arms.

“You got a name, kid?”

“James Novak.”

“And you wanna tell me, James Novak, how you think you’re gonna spring me?”

The kid reaches into his pocket, and raises a set of silver keys. “I thought these might be a good start.”

++++

John doesn’t know what to make of this kid.

He snaps the cold iron clip back into his pistol as he watches Novak clamber out the station’s second story window. He certainly moves like a kid, cautious and ungainly. Hasn’t figured out the proportion of his own limbs yet.

If he isn’t human, he just let John out of a well-latched cell, watched him walk - unarmed - past the sleeping deputy at the front desk, and didn’t do a goddamn thing as John picked the evidence locker door and loaded up on every weapon the cops had taken off of him: salt and silver and cold iron, pistol and knife and holy water. Enough to inconvenience everything John’s heard of, short of a demi-god.

Now why the fuck would anything inhuman watch a hunter do that?

The kid swings off the fire escape. He lands poorly, taking all the weight on locked knees, and he’s lucky he just rolls his ankle rather than breaking it. Another point towards a dumb kid. Hell, could be some hunter’s precocious little protege. Wouldn’t be the first one he’s run into.

Still, John mutters, “ _Christo_.”

The kid glances up from where he’s rubbing at his ankle. His eyes are clear.

John rolls his shoulders and sets off down the alleyway.

Novak falls into a limping step behind him, saying: “Where’s the—” There’s an awkward pause. “Your car?”

“I was hoping we could take yours,” John drawls. He pauses, glancing at him. “Wait. Don’t tell me. You’re not old enough to drive.”

Novak looks perplexed for a second. Finally he answers: “I don’t have a car.”

“ _Shit_ ,” John mutters to the pavement. He rounds on the skinny little prick, but the police station is still too close for comfort. He balls a fist and keeps walking. “You are not old enough to be in this business, you hear me? Get a god damned job at Burger King and get the fuck out of my face.”

The kid follows doggedly along, one pace behind. “Gladly. After you tell me what you’ve found out about the Colt.”

The Colt. That’s about the last thing John’s expecting out of the mouth of a toddler. “Why do you want to know?”

“I need it.”

“There are plenty of antique guns,” John says, dismissive. “Hell, go to a good gun store, you can buy one new.”

The kid’s tone goes crisp: “I think you’re aware of why I’m looking for one particular Colt. The one Samuel Colt made himself. For a hunter.”

“Yeah, you and everybody else I know. It doesn’t exist.”

“Maybe. What have you found?”

“Where are your parents? Who looks after you?”

“That doesn’t matter,” Novak says shortly.

“You’re not gonna feel that way when they’re gone.”

There, the kid hesitates. “They are.”

John stops, and looks at him. He's trying to weigh out these mannerisms: a kid with a steady hand and a steadier expression, looking for a gun that can kill anything. This is the first time Novak breaks his stare: down, to the left. He's lying.

John turns his back on him. “I can’t help you. I don’t know where the Colt is, if it exists at all.”

“But you have looked,” the kid insists. “And you must have others looking for you. Have you heard anything recently? When it was seen last?”

He's not listening anymore. The kid's a liar; the kid's impatient; and the kid's a liability. Probably doesn't even have a goddamned driver's license.

But the kid got him out, some fucking how. It's the only reason John doesn't knock him on his ass and walk away.

“I need my car, I need to get out of town, and I need a cup of coffee. Then we’ll talk.”

++++

There's cheap formica and bad diner coffee between them before John speaks again. “I’m going to tell you this, and then I want you to get the hell out of my face."

Novak looks up from his coffee, startled after an hour and a half of silence.

"I never want to see you again," John continues. "I don’t want to hear your name, I don’t want to hear you’ve been dropping my name, and if you come within five miles of another hunter I’ll have them beat you within an inch of your life. You got me? You’re a fucking kid. Go home.”

The kid says nothing. Just watches him.

John pulls a sheet of paper out of his journal, scribbles two dates and two locations, and slides the sheet across to him.

“The last mention Colt makes of the gun is March 4, 1861, when it was supposedly used to kill a phoenix in Sunrise, Wyoming. That’s the last written record of it. But it’s _rumored_ to have been in possession of the Campbell family when they died in Lawrence, Kansas, 1973.”

The kid nods along. He's getting impatient. “What about Daniel Elkins?”

Elkins? “He’s looking for it. Same as everybody.” Elkins was the one to point him towards Sunrise.

“When did you last talk to him?” Novak asks.

 _Not in a long fucking time, kid._ He answers: “Who told you to talk to me?”

“Bobby Singer.”

 _That’s_ bullshit. “Bobby Singer sent you to _me?_ You don’t mind if I give him a call, do you? There’s a payphone out back. Just take a moment.”

Novak evades, glancing out the window. Eventually he says, “Do what you like.”

Yeah. Bullshit.

John starts counting out bills. “I won’t call. You got me out, and I told you about the gun; we’re square. I’ll even pay for the coffee. But that’s all you’ll get from me. I hope to hell you’ve got money for a bus ticket out of here.”

“Yes,” the kid says dismissively, but he doesn’t get up. “When did you talk to Daniel Elkins last?”

Elkins again.

John stares at him. “I _said_ that’s all you’ll get from me.”

Novak stares right back; reading him, looking for any sign of a yield. He doesn’t get one. Folding the paper neatly, he gets to his feet. “Thank you. It’s been enlightening.”

The talk, the walk. It’s all off, for a kid in a hoodie and sneakers, but John didn't see a single flinch at the holy water in his coffee. If he's anything, he isn't showing it.

John’s got other shit to worry about. He makes a note to talk with Elkins, but it’s gonna have to wait. It’s a nine hour drive back to the boys, and he’s three days overdue.

By the time he's stepping into an empty motel room in Fort Wayne, Indiana, James Novak's the farthest thing from his mind.

 

 

END ACT II, CHAPTER ONE

 

 


	5. Nobody's Fault But Mine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The voice on the machine. | Liars. | A familiar place. | The man on the stairs.

They don’t camp that long.

Just the one night, really; they sit by the fire and Pastor Jim eats _three_ s’mores just like he said he would and Sam can’t even finish a second. He tries really hard but he only gets three bites out of it before his stomach goes all funny. Jim says it’s okay and that they’ll save the rest of the candy bar - this _huge_ chocolate bar, almost as big as Sam’s head - for Dean. Sam gets to sleep on the couch and Pastor Jim sleeps on a cot over by the door and Sam’s so tired and the fire’s so warm that he forgets to be afraid of how dark everything is, outside of that little tiny cabin.

After breakfast at a diner the next morning Sam gets to talk to Dean on a payphone, and that’s okay; Dean sounds really tired, still, and Sam asks if they were up all night fishing again, and Dean says they went white-water rafting and he fell out and the guide had to pull him back into the boat. Sam’s never seen white-water rafting before, but he remembers swimming in a creek with a really strong current once, and he looked up and the dock was really far and the water wouldn’t let him get back to it. It was really scary. He’s glad the guide pulled Dean back in.

After that they drive around awhile, and when they stop for lunch Pastor Jim goes to check his phone messages while Sam waits in the car. When he comes back, he says Dad called, and they’re going back. Not to the cabin, but to Blue Earth, and Sam’s happy, because Jim says Dad is coming, and Dean’s coming back soon, too.

They drive all afternoon. When they get back to the house in Blue Earth, the phone’s ringing to greet them.

Pastor Jim asks Sam to put away the groceries they picked up in town and goes to answer his phone in the office. Sam says, “Okay.” He does start moving the groceries around, but he listens a little bit, too. Pastor Jim didn’t say he _couldn’t_ , so Sam doesn’t think it’s eavesdropping or anything, and what if it’s Dean calling? Dean hasn’t called since this morning, and they were in a whole ‘nother state then.

Pastor Jim says, “Hello?” and Sam puts the cereal in the cabinet under the toaster. He says, “Yes. Yes, they did. They’re fine.” Sam tries to remember where the flour goes, then he remembers it goes up in the high cabinet over the sink, so he puts it on the counter. Pastor Jim says, “Uh—” and pauses as Sam pulls the milk out of its plastic bag and goes to put it in the fridge. Then he says all rushed, “John—they’re fine.”

Sam forgets the groceries. The fridge door slaps shut behind him, a little too loud, but Pastor Jim doesn’t seem to notice. “Sam’s with me,” he says. “Dean is with Bobby Singer. They’re both fine.” He pauses again. “Yes, of course.”

There’s a clack as Pastor Jim sets the phone down. Sam runs to the office door, all fears of eavesdropping flying out of his head. “Was that Dad?”

Pastor Jim’s leaning against his desk, looking like he’s thinking hard. He doesn’t look mad that Sam listened, even though Dad gets mad about that kind of thing all the time. “Yes. He’s finished his job.”

Dad finally calls, and he didn’t even ask to speak to him. Sam tries not to look disappointed. “Is he coming up here now? Is he gonna go get Dean?”

“I’m sure he will; he’s calling Dean right now, at Bobby’s. It’s a bit of a drive, remember.”

Sam’s face falls. “Yeah.”

The phone rings again. Pastor Jim holds up a finger in Sam’s direction to ask him to be quiet and answers it. “Yes?” He listens for a minute, and frowns. “They might not be there yet.” He looks up at the ceiling, like he does sometimes when Dean says something bad by accident. Then he says, “Of course” and holds the phone out to Sam.

Sam practically sprints across the room to pick it up. “Dad?”

“Sam, are you alright?”

He sounds mad. Sam’s stomach turns. “Yes, sir.”

“Why are you not with your brother?”

Sam doesn’t say anything at first, because he doesn’t know what to say. But then Dad says, “Sam?” and Sam has to say something so he just blurts out, “We went camping. He said it was just for a little while, until you came back.”

“Alright. I’m coming to get you, and then we’ll pick up your brother.”

Dad still sounds angry, but at least he isn’t angry at Sam. Sam’s going to say okay and ask if he wants to talk to Pastor Jim, but then he thinks, what if Dad’s mad at Dean? Dean didn’t do anything wrong. “Dad, wait— it’s not Dean’s fault we left. There was this guy in Indiana, and he was following Dean, and Dean hit him and ran away and we called Pastor Jim and came here. It was the guy’s fault, not Dean’s. And Dean and Pastor Jim and Uncle Bobby tried to call you like a billion times, Dad, I promise.”

Dad’s quiet a second. “What man? He came after you?”

“It was a kid, kinda. A big high school kid. He was following Dean. Dean said he knew his name. His whole name, not the pretend one we were supposed to be using.”

“Did he hurt you?”

“No, sir. But I think Dean was afraid he was gonna. That’s why we left.”

Dad’s quiet for a while, and then he says, “You did the right thing calling Pastor Jim.”

He doesn’t sound happy, but he doesn’t sound as angry anymore, either. Sam says, “Okay.”

“I’m coming to get you, but it’ll take me a while. I’ve still got a long drive ahead. I want your bags packed when I arrive. You hear me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Now put Pastor Jim back on.”

Dad yells so loud at Pastor Jim Sam can hear it clearly: “Some fucking thing attacked my boys you damn well tell me about it, immediately—”

Pastor Jim doesn’t say anything for a really long time, and Sam’s afraid Dad’s going to yell again. When he does reply, he just calmly says, “As I said, they’re alright” and ushers Sam out the door. He closes it quietly behind Sam.

Sam tries to listen for awhile, but Pastor Jim is still talking all calm and quiet, and all he can hear is murmuring. So he puts the rest of the groceries away, and when Pastor Jim comes out a while later he asks if Dad is mad at Pastor Jim and Pastor Jim says no, he’s just worried about him and Dean and he’ll be there in a few hours and he’ll be very happy to see that they’re safe.

So Sam goes upstairs and packs, and he waits for Dad, and he wonders if Dad’s going to be happy like Pastor Jim says.

++++

Dean slides out of the truck and reaches for the bag of groceries, but Uncle Bobby waves him off. It’s the kind of bag with no handles and he’d had trouble grappling with it one-handed in the grocery store. The cashier and bag lady had both cooed at him and made lots of sympathetic gestures over his cast, but Dean had just felt clumsy and foolish.

Bobby, at least, doesn’t make a show of it.  
  
Rumsfeld comes bounding into the house with a storm of full-throated barks of greeting. He passes by Uncle Bobby and settles his affections on Dean, so Dean returns the favor and kneels on the floor in the middle of the dining room and happily accepts the slobbering. He drapes himself over Rumsfeld’s back in a loose-armed hug and closes his eyes. Rumsfeld’s fur is warm from a few hours in the sun. It feels good after the cold of a South Dakota breeze.

He doesn’t fall asleep, but he loses a bit of time, because Uncle Bobby had been unpacking the groceries and now he’s got one hand on Dean’s back and is trying to coax him up off Rumsfeld.

“I’m not sleeping,” Dean asserts.

“No,” Bobby agrees, “I know. There’s something I want you to hear.”

Dean staggers to his feet and allows Bobby to steer him to one of the chairs at the table, and he waits while Bobby cues up the message machine and skips past the first couple messages.

It’s his dad’s voice. Dean twists in his chair to look at the machine, but the message is brief:

“ _I’m on my way. If you let anything happen to my boy, I swear to God I’ll kill you, Singer._ ”  
  
“He left another one, but doesn’t say much else,” Bobby says. “He must have skipped town without checking with the motel clerk, because he doesn’t seem to have realized anything was wrong until he reached the town where you two were staying and found you’d left. Jim must have filled him in on the details.”  
  
Dean curls his fingers around the chair back. “Can I hear the other message?”  
  
Uncle Bobby nods and hits a button on the machine. Dean stares at the message box, willing it to spill out more than just the sound of his Dad’s voice.  
  
“ _Singer, answer your damn phone. I’m in Fort Wayne and my kids aren’t here, and Jim Murphy says you’ve got one of ‘em. Why the hell you thought it was a good idea to split them up, I don’t know. I’m headed to Blue Earth; I’ll call you when I get there._ ”

It beeps, and then rolls over into the next message again.  
  
“ _I’m on my way. If you let anything happen to my boy, I swear to God I’ll kill you, Singer._ ”  
  
“He said he’s coming,” Dean reiterates. Because he’s not sure. He’s so tired, and his arm is starting to ache again, and he wants it to be real—but he’s not sure.  
  
Uncle Bobby nods again. “He did.”  
  
“Soon, right?” How many hours is it, to Fort Wayne? It feels like there’s a balloon inflating in his chest, and it’s hard to think around it.  
  
“About twenty hours, give or take traffic. But he’s been on the road since noon, according to Jim, and you know how your Dad drives when someone’s lit a fire under his ass.”  
  
And there’ll be a ‘fire under his ass’ for sure, Dean knows it. Dad’s coming, and nothing will stop him now. It’ll be less than twenty hours, whether there’s traffic or not. (And there won’t be; it’s getting dark already, which means fewer cops and lots of empty highway.) Soon Dad’ll be here.  
  
“When did he call?” How long has he been driving? It could be ten hours by now, maybe even five.  
  
“I don’t know. Sounds like he spoke to Jim. Why don’t you give him a call. You can talk to your brother, too, while I make dinner.”  
  
Dean almost trips over Rumsfeld in his haste to get to the phone. There are two phones in the house: one in the study, and one in the kitchen. It’d be quieter in the study, but he doesn’t want to be out of sight for too long, so he climbs up onto the counter to get close to the kitchen phone and dials Pastor Jim’s number.  
  
Sam is in high spirits, now that their Dad is coming to end their imposed separation. He spoke with Dad when he called from Fort Wayne. He can’t remember when the call came, but he tells all the details of the conversation to Dean - in his rambling, roundabout way - and he says Dad’ll be there “kinda late,” which Dean takes to be some time between 9 and 11. Which would put him at Bobby’s by midnight. That’s just four, five hours.  
  
It’s a weight off his shoulders that Dean hadn’t even realized he was carrying. But now he knows that whomever or whatever had been following him and Sam hadn’t gone after their Dad, too. All those unanswered messages didn’t mean—anything. Dad’s okay, and he’ll be here soon.  
  
Sam prattles on about seeing Rumsfeld and flying his new model airplane in the scrap yard, and about baking cookies to bring to Uncle Bobby. Dean nods along and tries to keep pace with Sam as best he can, but he’s tired and now that he knows Dad’s coming it’s like all the energy has rushed right out of him. By the time Bobby lays out plates on the table, Dean’s nodding against the cabinets.  
  
Pastor Jim talks to Bobby while Dean washes his hands, and then Dean’s sitting at the table with a bowl of soup and two halves of a grilled cheese in front of him, and he finds he has an appetite for the first time in a couple days.

“So I thought we’d set up an air mattress downstairs, after dinner,” Uncle Bobby says over their soup. “Maybe you could help me move some books down there, and I can work while you sleep.”  
  
Dean means to protest that he’s not tired, but it gets caught up in a yawn. He is tired—bone-weary, and achingly sore. And Bobby says he doesn’t know of a place safer than his basement. If Dean’s going to be safe anywhere, it’ll be there, especially with Bobby down there with him. And Dad will be here soon.  
  
“Your Daddy’ll be out for my hide if he gets here and sees you looking like an extra for a zombie movie, with those bags under your eyes. And the wait will go faster if you sleep,” he adds.  
  
Dean can’t argue the point.

So after dinner Bobby takes him downstairs and shows him the bomb shelter in his basement. He dusts off a little battery-powered mattress inflater and knocks it around until it starts working, and asks Dean to climb onto the air mattress and tell him when he thinks it’s been inflated enough.  
  
Dutifully, Dean climbs on and lies down, and that’s the last thing he remembers.

 

Sam wakes up to the engine turning off. He’s lying down in the backseat, a blanket pulled up to his chin. He’d boasted to Dean that he’d ask to sit in the front – the front is Dean’s seat, so it’s a big deal – but Dad had still looked pretty mad when they got in the car so he decided not to ask. It’d been okay, though, because he got to lie down in the back seat and he’s pretty sure he blinked at Pastor Jim’s driveway and now they’re in Bobby’s. He can hear Rumsfeld barking. The ceiling above his head is lit up with those orange lights that Uncle Bobby’s got all over his scrap yard.

Dad leans over the seat back. “Up, Sammy. Stir those stumps. Your brother’s waiting.”

“’k.” He sounds drowsier than he feels, but after he throws the blanket off and rubs his eyes a bit his body starts waking up, too. Dad’s already getting out of the car. Sam pulls on his sneakers with sleep-clumsy fingers and opens the door to follow. Rumsfeld keeps on barking at Dad, his breath puffing out in little cloudbursts, but he shuts up when Sam pats him on the head. He still growls when Dad walks past, though. Rumsfeld doesn’t like Dad very much.

Uncle Bobby appears at the door, probably ‘cause of Rumsfeld’s barking. He has a shotgun, too, but he tucks that away when he sees Dad. And then Dean’s at the door, too.  
  
Dad pushes past Uncle Bobby without saying anything, not even hi, and kneels down next to Dean and just sort of… looks over him for a long time. It’s kinda weird. He checks his hair and his face and his arms. But after all that looking, he gives Dean a short hug and then stands up and starts yelling at Uncle Bobby.  
  
“A guy comes after my fucking kid and nobody thinks to track me down? That’s the first thing you do. Step fucking one, you track me down. Somebody came after _my_ kid— _my kid_. And where the hell were you, anyway? He broke his fucking hand.”

Uncle Bobby starts yelling right back, which Sam has only seen like once, and it was just as scary last time. “You really gonna ask me where I was? Really? ‘cause I wasn’t the one who abandoned _my kids_ three states away.”  
  
Rumsfeld doesn’t seem to take kindly to the yelling, ‘cause he starts barking, and the driveway is suddenly really loud with everybody yelling.  
  
But Dean moves around Dad and gives Sam a huge hug—the kind Dean only ever gives to him. That’s when Sam notices the cast on Dean’s hand, which _definitely_ wasn’t there before.  
  
Sam tries to push back and ask, “What happened to your hand?” but his voice is all stupid and small and he can’t even hear it himself. Somebody hurt Dean.

“Come inside; it’s cold out here.” Dean ushers him inside to the kitchen, and pours them both a glass of milk.  
  
In the light Sam can see that Dean looks tired. His eyes have dark bags underneath them, and he looks kind of how Dad looks after a long day of driving when he says he’s ‘weary.’ And when Dean’s pouring the milk, Sam can see that there’s an awful bruise on Dean’s good arm, too.  
  
Dean notices him looking, though, laughs, and ruffles his hair with the good hand.  
  
“So I decided to play catcher, and see what that got me? This awful thing.” He waves the casted hand. “I’ll tell you, though, Uncle Bobby has one heck of a fastball. And _this_ guy”—he shows the bruise again, which looks kind of like a hand print painted in nasty purples and yellows—“I got when I fell overboard when we were rafting in the river. The park ranger had to pull me back in, and I almost ruined my cast. I got an earful for that.”

He wants to believe Dean because he always believes Dean. But Dad and Uncle Bobby are yelling, still, and it’s not about some stupid baseball game or white-water rafting, it’s about something big, something scary, and all he can say in a hoarse voice is: “No, that’s not it. It’s not. Why are you lying?”

Dean’s freckles stand out in the light.  
  
“I’m not lying. Why would you say that?”

“Why’s Dad yelling so much if it’s just about—about baseball and rafting and stuff? Why’s it Uncle Bobby’s fault? He yelled at Pastor Jim, too, he keeps yelling about the guy, the guy that was in our room, and now your hand’s all broke and—“ he’s starting to get all panicky and his throat’s getting all closed up so he stops talking, but then all he can hear is the barking and Dad and Uncle Bobby and he doesn’t want to hear that at all. He claps his hands over his ears and tries to make it go away, just a little.

“Hey, hey, hey.” Dean kneels down so he and Sam are at eye level, and he puts his hands over Sam’s and smiles. “It’s okay. Let’s go downstairs. There’s a bed made up.”

Sam doesn’t feel okay, but he takes a few breaths and nods and thinks maybe he’s beginning to. Then he hears the downstairs part, and frowns. He doesn’t go downstairs; Uncle Bobby said he’s not supposed to, because there’s spiders and sharp rusty things. “What’re we sleeping downstairs for?”

“I told Uncle Bobby your plan to camp out by the fireplace, and he was just so jealous that we decided to camp inside too. But there’s all those books and things in the library, so we set everything up in the basement.”

Sam smiles, at that. “Really? Did you make s’mores and stuff? I shoulda brought the leftovers, we had a whole big candy bar left…” He gestures with his arms way out to indicate how huge it was. It wasn’t really that big, but it looked that big, and they’d only been able to eat half of it.

“There’s no fireplace down there. It’s like a fallout shelter.”

“What’s a fallout shelter?”

Dean leans him down the steep steps into the basement, which is full of cobwebs and rusty things, just like Uncle Bobby said. But there’s a big iron door at the far end, and inside Sam can see there’s a mattress laid out with some blankets and two pillows.  
  
“A fallout shelter is like a bunker that people can retreat to if they were under attack. They built ‘em during the ‘50s, mostly, when we thought we might go to war with the Russians. There’s food and water and blankets, and a ventilation system. So you could lock the door and be safe for a while.”

Sam’s knowledge of Russians is about as vague as his knowledge of bunkers, but the idea of a room-fort pleases him. “Did they bring cards? ‘cause sitting in a room for a long time would have to be real boring… Oh, cool!” he announces, upon walking into the room proper. There’s big metal walls that makes him think this is what living inside a sink drain would be like, except there’s weird symbols on the walls and stuff. He points to the closest one, written in black paint at about his own height. “What’re those for?”  
  
Dean shrugs. “You’d have to ask Uncle Bobby. He told me, but I don’t remember.”  
  
It’s quiet down here. He can just barely hear Rumsfeld barking. But it’s cold, too. It’s too bad they can’t have a fire down here ‘cause then it’d be perfect. But Dean crawls underneath the blankets and holds them up for Sam, too, so he kicks off his shoes and joins him.  
  
There’s a big metal star over the lights, which makes really cool patterns on the walls and floor when the ceiling fan turns. Dean lies on his stomach to watch the patterns on the floor, and he lets Sam snuggle up next to him. Watching the shadows is cool, but it makes him tired, too.  
  
After a while, Dean says, “Dad’s not mad at Pastor Jim and Uncle Bobby. He’s just worried ‘cause of that guy back in Fort Wayne, and how we weren’t able to get a hold of him to tell him what happened. Did you know he drove all the way back to our motel and found it was empty? That’d scare me, too.”

Sam picks at the lumps on the sheets. It’d scare him, too, if he came home from school and everybody was gone. Dad and Dean and the Impala. He doesn’t like thinking about that, so he just says, “Yeah,” and tries to think about something else, but all he can think about is Dad and Dean. So he keeps picking at the sheets and says, “Sorry I called you a liar.”

“’s okay.” Dean ruffles his hair again.

“Are we gonna stay at Uncle Bobby’s now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Is Dad gonna apologize to Uncle Bobby for being worried-mad at him?”

Dean barks a laugh. “Probably not.”

“Shouldn’t he, though? I think Uncle Bobby’s _mad_ -mad at him.”

“Probably. But don’t worry about them, okay? Grown-ups can sort things out themselves.”

“Yeah.” He watches the ceiling for awhile, then he asks, “Does it hurt? Your hand?”

“This thing?” Dean waves the cast again. “Nah. And they gave me lots of good stuff, anyway. But I think we need to lay down a rule that Uncle Bobby is never allowed to pitch ever again. I’m pretty his sure his throws were peeling the stitching off the baseball.”

Sam tries to picture Uncle Bobby throwing a fastball like the pros do and giggles. "I bet Dad could throw harder."

“Well then he’s banned from pitching, too. My poor mitts can’t take it.”

“I told you you shoulda been pitcher.”

“Yeah, yeah. Heard you the first time.” Dean knocks into him with his shoulder, so Sam half falls off the mattress.

“Heeey—“ Sam catches himself and shoves back, except Dean doesn’t move nearly as much as Sam did.

“I don’t know about you, jellybean, but I’m tired. Think I might just take a bit of a nap. You got first watch?”

“Yeah!” He sits up and crosses his legs. “What’m I watching for?” Sometimes it’s aliens, sometimes it’s ninjas. One time it was brain-eating slugs that Dean said only salt would keep out.

“There are some pretty big spiders down here.” Dean nods, sagely.

“Ewww.” Sam gets his shoe off the floor, shakes it in case it’s already been invaded, and then sets it in his lap. “Don’t worry, I’ll squish ‘em.” Normally he wouldn’t, because Dad and Dean are better at squishing the scary crawly things, but this is a job and Sam takes jobs very seriously. Maybe he’ll wake Dean up if it’s a _really_ big spider, though.

“If you want, you can huddle up next to me while you keep watch. I’ve found this is a good spot for lookout.” Dean scoots over a bit so there’s room for Sam.

"'kay." It's way more comfy there, so Sam decides it's a good idea. It's okay if it makes him a little more sleepy because he never falls asleep on the job.

Dean’s voice is muffled by the pillow. “Night, Sammy.”

“Night.”

He stares at the ceiling for awhile, wondering if spiders can fit between the blades. Then he realizes the spiders must be coming from the basement, so he turns to face the door. He counts the shadows swooping over the metal door, 1, 2, 3, except he keeps closing his eyes and losing track. So he starts over, and then he starts over again, and finally he closes his eyes and doesn’t open them again for a long while.

++++

Dean wakes up to his hand throbbing and pinched beneath Sam, who is sprawled like an octopus to take up the majority of the mattress. He disentangles himself from the blankets and tries to slide the cast out from underneath Sam without jostling too much, for the sake of those tiny bones in his hand, but only manages so much success.  
  
He doesn’t even realize that anyone else is in the room until he hears the chair move, which gives him more than half a heartbeat’s panic. But the smell is there before Dean can get himself free to turn around: old leather and gunpowder and the bite of whiskey. Dad gets a hand at his shoulder and helps roll Sam a bit so that Dean can sit up.  
  
Sammy pushes his face into the pillow and curls up to escape the sudden cool air. Dad methodically tucks the blankets back in close around him, and Dean watches, with his breath held somewhere high in his chest.

When Sam’s squared away, Dad grabs the bottle of vicodin off the desk and offers him a glass of water. Dean accepts it gratefully, and swallows the pills down in one gulp. The only books on the desk are the ones Bobby was studying last night, and the chair is turned away facing the mattress. There’s a cot set up next to the desk, but the bedroll hasn’t been laid out, so Dean doesn’t think it’s been slept in.  
  
He wonders how long Dad had been watching them sleep. He’d driven a long time yesterday, surely he’d be tired; he looks tired.  
  
Dean hands the glass back, but Dad doesn’t set it down. Instead he turns Dean’s wrist over in his hands, looking at the handprint-shaped bruise that wraps around it. His expression is unreadable.

The air is chill here in the basement now that Dean’s sitting up. The house heat doesn’t extend too far into the basement, and while the blankets keep the worst of it at bay it was Sam’s little internal combustion engine that had done most of the work keeping him warm. He shivers—only slightly—and Dad shucks off his leather jacket and drapes it over Dean’s shoulders.  
  
“I’m okay,” he says, to break the silence.  
  
“I know,” Dad answers.  
  
They’re both quiet, but not for Sam’s sake. He’s spent almost his whole life in dirty motel rooms or one-bedroom apartments; the talking won’t wake him. He’ll start stirring about half an hour after Dean’s out of bed, like clockwork. He has a sixth-sense about that sort of thing.

Their words seem loud in the small confines of the panic room.  
  
“It doesn’t hurt, really. It looks worse than it is.” Dean hardly notices the bruising, except when someone points it out. Compared to the hand, it’s nothing.  
  
“Bobby said you haven’t been eating and sleeping.”  
  
“That’s not true.” Dean doesn’t understand—why Uncle Bobby would say that, or why Dad would take it so personally. “We had grilled cheese and soup last night, and then I slept until you arrived and after. And vicodin always makes me feel a bit off.”  
  
Dad nods to himself, like Dean’s words are just a confirmation of what Uncle Bobby had said. But he doesn’t seem angry, just resigned. “Can you tell me what happened?”

Dean glances down at Sam, who’s half-buried in the pillow with his mouth hanging open, and launches into the story. He tells Dad about the first encounter on the street, about the brick and how Sam says he appeared even though the door had been locked and Dean had run the whole way home. He tells about the appearance in Pastor Jim’s living room, too, though he thinks some of the details are jumbled there, and how he doesn’t remember going out or back into the house but that he’d definitely been outside.  
  
Afterward, Dad asks him things about Fort Wayne, about the people at school and at the motel and all the places he’d been. Dean doesn’t know anything, or have anything helpful to say, but Dad doesn’t seem mad. He listens and he looks at Dean, and when he’s done with his questions, he says, “Okay,” and pulls Dean into a hug.  
  
Dad puts one arm around Dean’s shoulders and one hand behind his head and he holds onto Dean. And Dean— Dean— He knew Dad would worry, but not how much: not how Dad would hang onto him like it’s the only thing keeping him here. It’s like somebody unscrewing a bolt, and everything comes frothing up to the surface. Dean presses his face into Dad’s shirt and hangs on right back, just as hard, maybe harder.

He knows he’s crying, and that his breathing is all watery and guttural again. But he’d screwed it all down, bolted it into place—he told himself there was nothing to worry about and he was just overreacting, that Pastor Jim and Uncle Bobby and Dad had everything under control. But it isn’t true, and everything seems so much larger than Dean; even though he’s twelve, it’s just so much bigger than he is, and it scares him, sometimes.  
  
He doesn’t want to know how to deal with all of it. He just— He just wants—  
  
Sam snuffles in his sleep and Dad clears his throat and lets go. He straightens up Dean’s hair and doesn’t mention it when Dean swipes at the tears on his face. Dean decides that he doesn’t really notice that Dad’s face looks red and unhappy, too. Must be the lighting.  
  
Dad clears his throat again and stands up, turning his back on Dean. “Go get something to eat. That’ll make your stomach upset if you don’t.”  
  
Dean feels shaky, a bit light-headed, but he goes.

Bobby is turning bacon in a skillet by the stove. When he sees Dean, he pushes a pitcher of orange juice in his direction. If he can tell Dean’s been crying, he doesn’t say. Dean takes the juice gratefully and pours a glass.  
  
“Sleep alright? Kept warm?" Bobby asks.  
  
“Yeah.” He’d slept so well that his whole body aches. Probably just now relaxing enough to attend to any other sores and bruises. “Sammy’s like a furnace. A really clingy furnace.”  
  
Bobby makes an amused grunt. "Yeah? Huh. You want eggs?"  
  
“Yes please. And one for Sam and Dad, too, if you don’t mind.”

Dean busies himself cleaning off the table and setting out plates. It’s probably best to get their stories straight while Sam’s still asleep. The sizzling bacon will give them a bit of cover if he comes up too soon. “I told Sam that I broke my hand playing baseball. And the bruising’s from white water rafting.”  
  
“Alright,” Bobby says. He starts sliding bacon out of the skillet and onto a plate. “So you went white water rafting with an old geezer like me? Dangerous business.”  
  
“Should have listened to you about not getting my cast wet, too. Good thing the park ranger pulled me out of the drink, yeah?”  
  
“Damn good thing. You would’ve been splattered all over a rock, otherwise. Would’ve had to scrape you off with a spatula.”  
  
“Don’t tell Sam so. He talked me out of going over that waterfall in a barrel, and I’d never hear the end of it. Oh, you’re never allowed to pitch, like, ever again. Decree of Sammy. Arm like that should be illegal.”

This time, Bobby actually gives a little laugh of surprise. “It is, actually. In 34 states. South Dakota’s still gettin’ around to it.”  
  
Dean laughs too, but only briefly. He’d rather get the apologies out of the way, too, while Dad’s not here. “I’m sorry about what my dad said. You know how he gets. He didn’t mean it.”  
  
Bobby pauses from stirring the eggs to turn and look at Dean. “Dean, it ain’t your job to apologize for him.”  
  
“Maybe.” He scuffs his feet. “Did he say how long we’re staying?”  
  
“We didn’t get that far in the conversation,” Bobby answers dryly. He turns back to the eggs before they burn. “Priority’s still on finding this kid.”  
  
“He’s gotta be Dad’s kind of thing, right? No way a person can do that.” Dad hadn’t said as much, but he’d been wearing that kind of expression.  
  
Bobby nods. “Whatever he is, he hasn’t got much aversion to salt lines. We’ll have to see how he does with some good iron buckshot.”  
  
He nods.  
  
Dean should be safe here, right? With Dad and Uncle Bobby and Rumsfeld, and the panic room in the basement and all those protective sigils. If they stay awhile, maybe that guy—that thing—will be smart enough to stay gone.  
  
“It’ll be alright, Dean. I may want to strangle him sometimes, but your dad won’t let a thing happen to you or your brother.”  
  
“I know.” At least, he thinks he does.

Nodding along, Bobby lets the topic rest there. “Sam still taking his eggs scrambled?”  
  
“Yeah. Scrambled eggs are easy. But he likes cereal a lot, so I don’t make breakfast too often.” Dean fiddles with the toaster, and the bread pops back out at him. He only startles a little—not enough that Uncle Bobby should notice.  
  
There’s a sound of feet shuffling on the hardwood floor. They both turn to see Sam coming through the doorway, hair mussed with sleep. “Mornin’, Sam,” Bobby says, and Sam answers back with a dutiful, “Morning, Uncle Bobby. Morning, Dean.” He pulls his usual chair out, climbs into it, and blinks blearily at his setting. He looks like he’s likely to fall asleep on the empty plate in front of him.  
  
It’s good to have Sam back. Kid is obnoxious as hell eighty-five percent of the time, but Dean still likes having him around, dopey sleep-face and all. He slides into his seat next to Sam when Bobby starts doling out the eggs. “Did you sleep alright?”

“Uh-huh.” He makes his point with a yawn.

Dad appears at the top of the stairs, and makes directly for the coffee brewing on the counter. There’s a very strained silence in the kitchen, but Dad just fills his cup and retreats back downstairs. Bobby serves the rest of their breakfast and seats himself at the table.

Dad is enough to wake Sam up, and he looks worried for a few minutes after Dad leaves. Still, soon enough he starts filling in the silence with his usual rambling: how old is Rumsfeld now (“old enough”), and how many books does Bobby have in his library (“too many”), and did he know there are things painted on the walls of his basement (“might’ve noticed”). Eventually he gets on the subject of the model plane Pastor Jim picked up for him, a story which he breaks with an over-excited, “Thanks, Dean! Pastor Jim said it was from him and you but that it was mostly your idea and it’s the greatest—“ That spills into a 10-minute story about how he got it stuck on the cabin’s roof and Pastor Jim had to chase it down with a rake. Dean has to remind him from time to time to shut up and eat his food. Sam takes one or two mouthfuls, swallows, and continues on yapping until the next reminder. So goes breakfast at Uncle Bobby’s.

When Sam finally runs out of stories, or at least pauses long enough to finish his plate, Dean takes the opportunity to shuffle him up to the sink to help with the dishes and leave Uncle Bobby to his newspaper. Keeping the cast dry makes the washing difficult, but Sam is the designated dryer so Dean makes a go of it one-handed and does a decent job in about twice the usual time.  
  
They’re down to a plate and a few cups when Dad comes back upstairs for a refill on his coffee. Dad and Uncle Bobby share a look that even Sam couldn’t miss and retreat into Bobby’s library, shutting the door behind themselves. Sam is silent beside him as they both wait to see if there will be more arguing, but things stay quiet.  
  
Dean finishes scrubbing the last few pieces and takes Sam’s towel. “How ‘bout you go upstairs and shower, alright? Dad hasn’t decided whether we’ll stay yet, and you won’t want to keep him waiting if he wants to go.”

“Aw—but I showered two days ago.” He paws at his hair, testing to see if it’s clean. It isn’t, but he looks like he’s willing to argue otherwise.

Dean doesn’t let him. “The duffel’s still in the car. Don’t forget.”

"Fiiiine." Sam trudges off, and Dean reaches for the next glass to dry. His eyes are on the study doors.

 

Sam very nearly collides with Castiel on the stairs.

He steps aside by habit, but there’s little reason behind the motion. He’s masking himself, standing as an observer just beneath this world’s skin. Sam doesn’t perceive him, even as he passes within inches of him on his slow trudge up to the upstairs shower. Neither does Dean, drying glasses by Bobby Singer’s kitchen sink.

Dean sets the glasses down slowly, his movements hampered by the new cast on his right hand.

It was a risk, coming here. He was afraid Armisael might have assigned one of his soldiers to watch Dean and his family, but for now they seem to be occupied elsewhere. Beyond the brief chases he’s led them on after any significant flights - Maryland, Louisiana, Colorado - he has had no contact with his pursuers.

It was a risk, but it has settled in his favor. This is a moment of rest, even if he must expend more of his waning grace to keep out of the humans' perceptions.

The Colt is proving a frustrating dead end: it is no longer at the residence of Daniel Elkins, and none of the hunters that Castiel has attempted to communicate with have heard of its whereabouts. If Castiel properly interpreted the drunken non-answers Elkins gave him in a Louisiana bar, Elkins himself is unaware it is no longer in his possession. If it was stolen, it was stolen recently.

There are other options for killing Azazel, should the Colt prove impossible to find. An angel’s sword, if he can find it; as a Grigori, Azazel is still angel enough to fall to a weapon of Heaven. For a time he flirted with the idea of allowing Armisael’s unit to catch up and attempting to ambush and disarm one of them, but he can’t risk it. If he is caught by one, the others will be there in the span of a breath. Unarmed and weak as he is, he would have better chances fighting Azazel with his bare hands than attempting to take on four of his own brothers.

There are rumors of lost weapons elsewhere. Old battlefields, still scattered with a handful of relics. Sodom, Gomorrah. Babel. All too far for him to reach easily. He would have to make the journey in steps, a process that would only exhaust him more. Long flights are a risk; he’s been intercepted midflight before. That was a lesson he learned with bloodshed.

The kitchen ceiling rattles and groans as the shower rattles to life upstairs. Dean sets down a glass, takes a last glance up the stairs, and moves in quiet steps towards the closed library doors.

Curious, Castiel moves closer.

Dean drops into a crouch. He’s careful to keep to the side, where his shadow won’t fall on the crack beneath the doors. Bobby Singer and John Winchester are conversing on the other side, but for several minutes, it isn’t a coherent conversation. There’s only muttered words or phrases in reference to whatever books they’re reading, punctuated by comments like “Not fast enough” or “Would have left residuals all over the place.”

Castiel realizes they are likely hunting him.

Strange to consider, being hunted by a Winchester. By Bobby Singer.

Still - they aren't a threat.

The shower stops running upstairs, and Dean starts to move away. He stops when there’s the sound of feet shuffling behind the doors.

Closer, John Winchester says: “There’s nothing to go on. We can look at books all day, but we need more information to pin it down. Have Jim sweep his place again, anywhere Dean or that thing might have been, and I’ll go check out Pontiac.”

“You’re gonna drag your boys into this?” It’s phrased as a question, but Bobby’s tone suggests - insists - it isn’t. “You got no idea what’s out there.”

“No, they’re safe here. I’ll hit Jim’s on the way back, too, see what I can root out. Try to figure out what this thing is.”

“You’re not gonna leave them here.” This time, Bobby speaks it as a demand.

“Hey, Dean?” Sam calls from upstairs.

But by Castiel’s feet, Dean isn’t moving. He waits, listening, breath stilled in his chest.

“Like you said, this thing seems to know how to find them wherever they go - find Dean wherever he goes,” John says. “So if he’s safe here than he’s staying here. He’s scared, and he’s man enough not to wear it on his sleeve, but you look him in the face and tell him he can’t, I dare you.”

“You dumbshit,” Bobby says. “He doesn’t feel safe ‘cause he’s in my damn house. I’ve been watching him two days now, and the only thing that seems to make him feel better is having your sorry ass around. So no, you’re not going to Illinois. If you want someone to case the place, I’ll go.”

There’s silence as John Winchester considers.

“Hey, Dean,” Sam shouts. “Think we can go out and try my model plane again?”

Castiel realizes that Dean’s lips are moving in some silent prayer. After a moment he makes out the pattern: ‘ _Don’t go. Please, please, don’t go._ ’

“Hey, Dean!” Sam calls again, and footsteps hit the stairs.

Dean scrambles to his feet and sets to busying his hands, moving glasses back into cabinets.

It’s good timing; the library doors slide open just as Sam’s bare feet are slapping the floor.

For a second time, Castiel is face-to-face with John Winchester.

He can see many aspects of the Winchester brothers he knew in their father: the distrust, the determination. But he is beginning to understand Sam’s reservations about the man.

John gives Dean a quick glance and heads towards the front door without a word. Bobby Singer follows behind with a duffel in his hand. He selects a set of keys out of the collection on the wall as he goes.

Dean looks at the Impala keys, still resting on the kitchen table. He curls his fingers into the sleeve of his shirt. It’s only after he hears the pickup out front backfire that he settles back into his own skin. He turns his attention toward Sam, who seems intent on wearing the linoleum down with his restless motion. Dean grabs him by the shoulders and steers him towards the back door. “Arright, arright, arright, let me see this plane of yours. C’mon. But you’re the one that’s gotta make sure Rumsfeld doesn’t eat it, ‘cause he’s gonna try. You got that?”

“Nooo, he can’t catch it, it’s too _fast_ ,” Sam insists. The back door slaps shut behind them.

Castiel marks the positions of the humans in his mind. When all four are at a comfortable distance, he drops back into full reality. It is a relief. He is more flesh than grace, these days. Aspiring to anything higher is exhausting.

He steps into the organized chaos of Bobby Singer’s personal library. It is much like he last remembered seeing it, although the untidy piles of books have not been widened enough to accommodate the path of a wheelchair, and the desk that Sam usually claimed - books piled in a chaotic order of his own, and a legal pad filled with careful sketches and penciled notes - is currently buried beneath boxes and files. Sam and Castiel shared that desk, for a time, working in comfortable silence, save the occasional murmured question from Sam and whatever answer or clarification Castiel could provide.

They never found any of the answers that mattered. It was time wasted, but— as he runs his fingers along the worn edges of this desk once again, he finds he does not regret it.

Today, it’s Bobby’s desk that is scattered with newspaper clippings, open books, and weather charts. John had mentioned Pontiac. They’ve found Jimmy Novak. His vessel is a juvenile here, and missing juveniles are taken more seriously. So it isn’t a surprise that he sees Jimmy’s face - smiling uncomfortably in a suit and loudly patterned tie - reproduced as a grainy photo in the newspaper atop the desk. It is his senior photo, and he was not comfortable with the tie chosen for him. It was an Easter gift from his father, and his mother insisted upon it.

He starts to move the newspaper aside to look at the notepad beneath, but stops as he reads the headline in full:

_Parents Found Dead in Home of Missing Illinois Teen._

His first thought is of the lie he told John Winchester outside an Arkansas police station. How strange to see it in print. It was a lie, a ploy to gain some sympathy, some common ground; what hunter did not have a dead relative haunting their footsteps? But it was a _lie_. He knows the Novaks’ future. Anna Novak will die of liver cancer, May 21st, 2005. Her husband will outlive her by four years, nine days, and sixteen hours. Heart failure.

It’s become second nature to check for Dean's whereabouts: almost a comfort measure, to reach out every few minutes and listen, _hear_ his soul, settled in the proper time and space. Still here. Still safe.

He has not looked at Pontiac, at his vessel’s kin; why would he? Of course they would be there. They have to be. He hasn’t changed their fates. He hasn’t changed anything, not yet.

But when he reaches out to Pontiac - when he reaches out to _anna novak paul novak_ \- there’s nothing.

Even in the deep sleep of angelic possession, his vessel senses this, knows this, and despairs. Castiel pushes back at the welling emotion, biting acidic at the back of his throat.

The Novaks are dead.

All thoughts of the Colt - of a weapon - are forgotten. He pushes towards Pontiac, leaving a whirlwind of papers and charts in his wake.

 

Dean wakes up feeling like something’s wrong.

He thinks something must have woken him, but he doesn’t hear anything. It’s late; Bobby’s house is dark beyond the panic room door. Dean rolls his head to look for Dad. He’s sitting too still in his chair, not turning any pages.

Rumsfeld starts barking. It’s not loud by the time the sound reaches the basement, but he and Dad are both listening for it. Dad checks his gun and sets it down by the mattress on the floor, but motions Dean not to follow.

“I’ll check it out. Stay with your brother.”

“Dad, don’t—”

“I said stay with your brother, Dean.”

There’s no reason to be afraid. There are wards all over this place that keep things from getting in, Uncle Bobby said so himself. And there’s no way that anything’s getting past Dad. Dad’s the best. He knows.

But the guy said he’d be alone.

He grabs the Bowie knife under his pillow and wraps the blankets tighter around himself.

Rumsfeld’s barks taper off with a kind of confusion, like he forgot what he was barking about mid-way through.

Dad’s footsteps make the floorboards creak as he checks the front and back doors, and then he starts casing the perimeter, checking all the windows. Dean waits until the footsteps return to the kitchen before he releases the breath he’s been holding. He lets his head fall back onto his pillow.

The kitchen light comes on, throwing shadows down the basement stairs. Dean can hear Dad muttering, “Stupid mutt. If this is about a squirrel, I’ll shoot the damn thing myself,” and then the back door swings open and shut.

Dean picks at a bit of fuzz on his pillowcase and waits for Dad to come back inside. He wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a raccoon or a possum; Rumsfeld’s a good guard dog when it comes to salesmen and Jehovah’s witnesses, but he’s kind of dumb when it comes to things like that. Sam swears he saw Rumsfeld get chased off by the neighbor’s cat once.

Rumsfeld barks again. This time’s at Dad, Dean can tell.

He glances up, and prickles of fear spring up all over him.

There’s a shadow at the basement landing of the stairs.

Dean scrambles up onto his knees, jostling and maneuvering awkwardly on the air mattress. He hangs onto the Bowie knife with his good hand.

“Dad?”

Dad doesn’t answer, but Sam does, stirring sleepily beside him. “Dean?”

The figure on the landing steps closer. Dean grabs Sam’s shirt and hauls him back, away from the door.

Sam’s awake, now, and confused. “Dean, wha—” He follows Dean’s stare to the shadow in the doorway. His breath gets fast and his voice gets small. “Dean—”

The figure steps into the light that falls out the open door and it’s not the same guy - not the swim team kid from Pontiac. That doesn’t mean anything, though. There are shapeshifters and demons that can change bodies at will and who knows what else that Dad hasn’t told him yet. Dean backs Sam up against the wall and stands half in front of him with the knife held out. He’s right-handed. He hasn’t even started learning off-hand knife work yet, but this thing doesn’t need to know that.

It’s wearing a businessman this time: fitted suit and tie cinched all the way up to his neck. He’s old, deep wrinkles that have settled into a cold sneer and white shocks of hair sweeping back from his temples. He looks down at the knife and smiles. “Dean Winchester. You’re smaller than I remember.”

“Sam,” Dean says, “as soon as you can I want you to run. Alright? You see an opening and you take it, and you run for the back porch. Dad’s out there. Okay?”

Sam’s hands curl into the back of Dean’s shirt. He makes a noise that isn’t a yes or a no.

“Oh, he can go.” The man steps to the side, allowing a clear line of sight to the door, but not enough tolerance for Dean’s liking. He could reach out and grab either of them if they make a dash for it. “It’s just you. You really can’t know how much trouble you’ve given us - or maybe you can.”

Dean follows the man’s eyes down to the bruising on his wrist, the handprint. And then, like poorly cut stop-motion, the businessman is right next to him, holding his wrist and twisting so hard that Dean’s forced to the ground or else risk dislocating his shoulder. The Bowie knife clatters to the floor.

The movement rips Dean’s shirt out of Sam’s grip, and it seems to shake him out of his fear enough to move - but not toward the door. His leg bangs against Dean’s side. “Stop! _Stop!_ ”

“Kindly shut it or I’ll do the same to you,” the man shouts, and Sam hushes into scared silence. His screeching echoes around the room a second more.

In the silence, the man continues inspecting Dean’s wrist with no regard for the way human joints actually work. “Castiel has been to see you, hasn’t he,” he observes. “Or you’ve managed to come across a very strong small person. I’m inclined to say no. This looks like his handiwork. It’s appropriate, actually, considering.”

Dean puffs out a breath against the concrete floor and rolls his head to look at Sam. He mouths: “Get. Dad.”

Sam stares at him, eyes wide. He’s just a scared kid. But he’s a scared kid that knows how to take orders.

He turns and runs, bare feet slapping on the basement floor.

The man doesn’t seem to care. He continues, “Either way, I’m sure he’ll come running. It’s his ‘thing.’”

Upstairs, Sam is at the door shouting for Dad, and he can hear Dad shouting back. Dean twists around and the knife is a few inches from his face. He paws at it with the casted hand and just gets his fingers around it when the man hauls him upright.

That thing smiles down at him with a row of perfect teeth, metal fillings and all. “We shouldn’t keep him waiting, should we?”

He can hear Dad thundering up the porch steps. And then the basement slides out of existence.

 

END ACT II, CHAPTER TWO


	6. a horse with no name

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a message in blood. | where's your brother, sammy? | holy ground.

He returns to the Novak house just past midnight. There is nothing waiting for him. It’s a dark room draped in crackling sheets of plastic, weighted with the stale tastes of dried blood and pungent sulfur.

He is days too late to parse this mystery. But they left him a gift - Novak’s parents, eviscerated - and a message. Moonlight dulls the harsh lines of Enochian scripted on the wall from crusted, muddy red to black.

> _Brother -_  
>  _We see you._

It’s scripted in as careful a hand as a message written with sundered flesh will allow.

He stares at the jagged edges of Enochian, black in the filtered moonlight. His own tongue. Not the language of the average demon.

Azazel?

He doesn’t know.

This world is shifting rapidly beneath him, and it is nauseating.

 _Infuriating_.

He’s jerked from his thoughts by the spill of artificial light across the entryway. It narrows to a flashlight beam, scoping the limited view beyond the front door.

Castiel crosses the living room in hurried steps, sneakers crackling on the plastic which has been spread to preserve the murder scene. By the time the door swings wide he is still, shoulders pressed into the wall adjoining the entrance hall.

What enters wears a police officer, but Castiel can see the black soot roiling within its flesh.

There’s time enough for the demon’s eyes to widen in recognition before Castiel seizes the flashlight by its metal barrel and shoves it into the bridge of the demon’s nose. Bone and cartilage give with a wet crack.

The demon jerks back with the force of the blow, but its hands are not idle. It rips the baton from its belt and lands a hard blow across Castiel’s exposed ribs. Castiel grunts and wrenches the flashlight free, shearing fragile tendon and bone in the demon’s wrist. Another hit to the ribs. Castiel doesn’t pay it any mind. He slams the barrel of the flashlight into the side of the demon’s head, once, twice.

Blood blooms as the officer’s hat falls to the floor. It’s the pause Castiel needs. Burying his hand in its collarbone, he hurls the demon against the wall. He’s upon it again before it can regain its feet, throwing it down to the plastic sheeting. He clamps a fist against the demon’s throat. It grapples at his face with its intact hand, but can find no purchase. Tossing the flashlight aside, Castiel seizes the offending arm and pins it to the floorboards.

The demon never thinks to reach for the gun on its belt. Demons rarely do. They prefer to tear at flesh with teeth and bone.

“Who do you serve?” Castiel snaps.

The demon smiles. “Your sister.”

Castiel bears down, teeth bared. Its eyes are black, with an angel in such close proximity; he can feel the demon’s essence squirming where his hands are against bare skin. “ _Which?_ ”

The demon chokes a laugh.

“What does she _want?_ ”

“What do we want?” the demon parrots back. With a jerk, it grasps at his wrist with its broken arm. It sends a surge of its own polluted essence against Castiel’s skin. Grace blooms across Castiel’s skin, a static snap of defense against the demon’s corruption.

The demon stares at this physical manifest of Castiel’s essence. Its black eyes are as entranced as they are afraid.

Then its head is snapping against the floor as it floods from its hosts mouth in a black cloud.

With an inarticulate shout of frustration Castiel clamps down on its throat, trying to stem the flow. He doesn’t succeed. The demon - singed, but largely intact - floods out in a rush, and spills beneath the door and into the night.

In the stillness that follows, Castiel’s abused ribs beat a dull rhythm with his heartbeat.

There’s no pulse against his fingertips; the host is gone.

He mutters a low curse.

It will take time for the demon to find a new host, but he doubts its superiors have gone far. The message on the wall makes it plain that they were waiting for him to come here.

But that does not affect the dead police officer beneath him, with Jimmy Novak’s hand on his throat.

He moves quickly. Stepping back into the living room, he tears the curtains off the windows. Some he scatters within the living room and kitchen; the rest, he tosses across the corpse.

There’s a small bottle of cooking sherry hidden in an upper cabinet, and another container of lighter fluid beneath the kitchen sink. It is enough. Within a few minutes, he is ushering flame across the entirety of the small home’s downstairs.

It spreads greedily, melting through plastic to grasp at the more flammable carpeting and flooring beneath.

There will be little for his vessel to return to.

He lingers a moment longer. The flame licks the walls, shifting from blues to oranges to yellows as it leaps towards the bloody message scripted across the wall.

There was already nothing for his vessel to return to.

Spreading his wings, Castiel steps from the thickening air into the cold of a dark Ohio street. Without thought he pushes himself to two more jumps before he pauses, considers; he’s standing in the ruckus of a Montreal bar, but on all the planes that matter there is — silence. Stillness.

No one is pursuing him. Nothing is breaking through the planes, not in Indiana, or Ohio, or here. None of the angels have noticed his flight.

Or if they have, they aren’t giving chase.

It takes a moment before Castiel thinks to look for Dean. A small irony. Since his arrival in this time, checking for Dean has become a compulsion, reaching out on short intervals to take comfort in that familiar soul. To drive out the lingering memory of a bottomless nothing.

When he last checked Dean, he was in Sioux Falls. That was an hour hence, while slowly parsing through the photos of a stolen file in the back corridors of a Pontiac police station. He was with his father, and his brother. He was safe.

When he looks now, Dean’s soul burns bright in a distant corner of Kentucky.

No human mode of transportation could’ve moved the boy that far in such a span of time. Something is wrong.

This world turns and turns--

 

 

 

Dad’s running fast.

Sam feels small and clumsy and cold, stumbling down the stairs after him. His mind’s running in one small circle: it’s okay because Dad’s here. Dean said get Dad and Dad’s here so it’s okay. It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.

It’s okay, except they’re at the big heavy iron door and Sam can see the basement’s empty. Dean’s not there. The man isn’t there.

Dad runs in but Sam stops in the doorway, staring. The basement floor’s cold against his feet. There’s a gun next to the bed. Dean’s not there.

“Where is he?” Dad rounds on him, big and tall and looming. “Where’s your brother, Sammy?”

He doesn’t wait for an answer. He steps past Sam and scans the rest of the basement, ducking his head to look under the workbench and behind the water heater.

“He was here,” Sam says. It’s the only thing he can think to say.

Dad kneels down in front of him, and he holds his hands out to either side of Sam’s head without touching him. His hands are shaking badly. “I need you to tell me what happened, Sam. What happened?”

Sam tells him everything in short, slow sentences: the man in the doorway, and how he hurt Dean’s arm, and how Dean told him to run. When he’s done he realizes something. The idea makes him feel colder. “Did he take Dean?”

Dad doesn’t answer. Maybe he doesn’t hear. He starts yelling for Dean, climbing the stairs three at a time and moving through the house room by room, turning on all the lights and opening all the doors.

They search the whole house, and the yard, and then the basement one more time with a funny-looking box thing with lights and a swinging needle. Dad said stay close and Sam does, keeping ten feet back, a pale-faced shadow. Sam doesn’t understand. Does Dad think Dean’s hiding? Why would Dean hide when he knows he’s scaring Dad, and scaring him, too? That would be mean, and Dean’s never mean.

Dad keeps running his hand through his hair and talking to himself. He looks a lot like Dean did the one time Sam got sick for a long time. Dean paced around the motel room a lot and kept saying how Sam’s cough was getting really bad, and he pulled at his hair so much it stood straight up. But he bought Sam lots of popsicles and let him stay home all week, so it wasn’t that bad.

They go into Uncle Bobby’s study and Dad puts Sam in the big comfy armchair while he makes a phone call. Sam tries to sit really, really still so he doesn’t make any noise and distract his dad.

It doesn’t matter how quiet he is, anyway; Dad yells into the phone. “I need to know what can get into the locker downstairs, ‘cause it just dragged Dean out.” He looks at Sam. “Dean was inside the room, right? He didn’t step out?”

Sam nods.

“He was in there and it took him. I didn’t even see it; he just fucking disappeared. You said that room was demon-proof. What else can take him like that?”

‘Took him’.

Sam bunches his pajama leg in his hands, watching the fabric twist.

Dad said ‘took him’.

“No EMF, no sulfur, no footprints, no tiretracks.” Dad turns on the radio. It plays a few upbeat notes and then he cuts it off again. “No EVP. There’s nothing here. What can do that.”

Sam’s still cold. He pulls his knees up to his chest.

Way at the back of his head there’s a calm voice saying that a monster took Dean, a monster shaped like a man.

Then he thinks, _no_. Dad’s here, and Dad said monsters aren’t real, even if he is talking to Uncle Bobby about demons and stuff. Why would Dad lie about that?

But… but a person wouldn’t sneak past Dad and Rumsfeld and hurt Dean. And a person wouldn’t disappear. A person wouldn’t take Dean away when Dad was _right here_. Dad wouldn’t let somebody just do that. Just walk in and do that.

Sam feels small, and scared, and Dean’s not here to make it better. But he’s not gonna make any sound because Dad’s gonna fix it. He will. Sam just has to be quiet and still and Dad’ll find Dean and Dean’ll be okay and if it is a monster Dad’ll kill it dead for hurting Dean and taking Dean away.

It’s okay.

It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s okay.

 

 

 

The air is still heavy with moisture in this corner of Kentucky. The promise of lightning still crackles over the skeletal treetops, hanging low with the weight of a recent rain.

Dean is within a small chapel that sags under its own weight, clothed only in gray shingles and lopsided shaker sidings. Crooked boards guard windows that have long since been shattered. On the roof and around the doorframe are the only signs of recent life: the brilliant luminescence of fresh Enochian wards. They place limits on entry and exit from this battered holy ground. An angel can only enter, and only depart, through the chapel’s weathered entrance.

Castiel can see well enough within. And why not? They needn’t hide. Armisael and his brethren wait, bathed in the dim flicker of candlelight.

Castiel stands in the rain-slicked grass for a long moment.

He wants to pull the sheet from his back pocket. To attempt to descry the next sentences to appear there.

Is this how it ends? Just as he begins?

No.

_No._

But he cannot leave Dean. Not here; not with them.

This world spins and spins—

He catches the rising chaos in his ears in a clenched fist and kneels in the grass, running his fingers through the dirt. At last, he comes across what he wants: a small piece of shale, its edge still sharp.

He slips the rock into his pocket and rubs the wet clay against his jeans.

Slowly, he steps towards the angels’ chosen battleground.

As his sneakers bear down on the first rotted floorboards, the angels wait patiently in their pews. All are in attendance: Armisael, Calabriel, Saviel. Arathon. They sit as straight-shouldered sentinels in the pews that have yet to rot away.

At the end of the aisle lies Dean, asleep. He is displayed on the altar as a prize. Or a sacrifice.

Castiel does not engage with his brothers. He says nothing at all, and strides up the aisle in long steps.

Arathon rises and blocks his path.

“Do not touch me,” Castiel snarls, a warning bathed in hatred. Arathon does not look surprised at the vitriol.

It’s Armisael that answers, low and cold: “What have you done, Castiel?”

“Return him to his father,” Castiel demands. His voice sounds tinny - human - to his own ears.

Armisael says nothing. His soldiers say nothing.

Castiel shoves at Arathon, but the angel only rebuffs him with a patient hand. “What do you _want?_ ”

To his right, Armisael at last turns to look at him. “We want only to return home.”

Castiel stares back. “Then go.”

“We can’t.” He annunciates very clearly. Already, the rain has resumed a steady rhythm on the church roof. It spills in rivulets through the ruined shingles. “It’s not there anymore. What evil you have wrought upon this world, I know not, but we intend to see you undo it.”

Around him, he can feel the stares of his brothers and sister. Their faces are expressionless, but he can see their colors roiling beneath.

It’s true, then. They can’t see Fate’s path. Even for them, the future has shifted.

“You’re mistaken,” he answers slowly. “Something of this large a scale - you know it’s well beyond my power.”

Armisael stands, and looms above him. He’s toe-to-toe with Castiel, but infinitely more in wrath and power. “You unwrit the prophecies of old and it is blasphemy, truly, and you _will_ be made an example. But this is too far. You have defied the Fates, you have _unbound existence_ , and I will deconstruct you thread by thread if I must to see it restored. We shall not suffer for the wickedness you have brought forth. So tell me, again, that you have no part in this. _I defy you_.”

Castiel does not drop his gaze, as rank dictates; nor does he raise his voice to match. He speaks with slow precision: “I did not do this.”

Armisael is stronger and faster than Castiel has ever been. When Armisael grabs at his throat and slams him to the floor there is nothing for Castiel to do but grasp feebly at him as Armisael balances the cold metal of his sword above the pulse of his lifeblood.

His focus narrows to the sword, and speaking three words past the vice at his throat: “It’s the truth.”

Armisael sneers and steps back. Arathon steps into his place. He does not draw his sword. Instead, he sets to carefully unbuttoning his sleeves, and rolling them neatly back to the elbow.

Here is a challenge Castiel welcomes.

Castiel shoves off the ground, burying a shoulder in the soft beneath Arathon’s ribs. Arathon overbalances and they both hit the earth, no doubt more out of complacency on Arathon’s part than any real force on Castiel’s.

With a wordless shout Castiel buries his knee in Arathon’s chest and slams a fist into his jaw. It does little damage, but it’s _satisfying_ , an electric thrill in the milliseconds before Arathon buries his fist in Castiel’s ribs. Bone gives with a crack, and Castiel jerks backward to protect the weakened area.

A hard blow to the side of the head sends his senses reeling. He grapples blindly, finding purchase and then striking with ineffective blows to chest or arm or head. One lucky strike lands on throat, but Arathon remains unfazed. He shoves Castiel off, and Armisael steps neatly aside to allow Arathon the room to shove Castiel onto his back and land several more blows against the weakness he’s found in Castiel’s ribs.

The fight ends rapidly. The air leaves Castiel’s chest in a rush - a knee or an elbow to the stomach, he does not know - and he is face down against the floor, ears ringing from the forceful meeting of skull and earth.

Somewhere beyond the ringing in his ears, Armisael is drawling: “I’d been told violence against you has no effect. Very well. We shall try a different tack.”

His awareness sharpens at the snap of Armisael’s fingers. On the altar, Dean sputters into wakefulness, choking down air in gasps. Saviel and Calabriel drag him off the plinth, lifting him to his feet.

Castiel shoves against the hands pinning him to the floor. “Stop--”

“Why should we? The future is changed,” Armisael states from above him. “He’s nothing.”

Saviel draws a blade, placing it against Dean’s throat. “ _Stop!_ ”

“Just another monkey sitting at a typewriter,” Saviel says.

“It’s the _truth!_ ” Castiel shouts back. “Not even the Fates know who wrought this.”

“You spoke with one of the Fates?”

“Yes,” Castiel spits.

Armisael gestures. Arathon drags Castiel to his knees, but an iron grip remains on the back of his jacket.

Dean seems to have woken sufficiently to grasp the gravity of his situation. He’s gone very still, arched away from Saviel’s blade, but he’s not idle. There’s a knife in his hand. The angels had not bothered to disarm him. As Castiel watches he swaps it from the crippled hand to the bruised one, and his eyes are on the escape route.

He’s going to attempt to flee. Castiel can see him lining up his path as though it’s a trick shot in pool: a stab to one of the angels holding him, which will have no effect beyond mild irritation, and a dash for the doorway. And if he should make it out the doors - which he will not - he can’t get far. Castiel is not strong enough to detain all four of them, nor fast enough to help Dean flee to safety.

He looks at Dean and shakes his head. It’s a betrayal, in a way, but it would only end in Dean getting hurt.

Calabriel takes notice. He tosses the knife aside before any material damage can be done. Dean gives Castiel a look of loathing.

“Cheeky one,” Saviel murmurs. “Even at this age.”

Armisael steps before Castiel, blocking his view. “Tell us what you have done to the Fates, Castiel. I won’t ask again.”

“I didn’t do anything,” Castiel answers. “We talked, nothing more. Return Dean to his father and I’ll tell you what we discussed.”

“No,” Armisael counters. “But we can harm him until you tell us what you discussed.”

“This is Michael’s vessel,” Castiel snaps.

“Well, not any _more_ ,” Saviel snarks. She mimes the action of pulling a trigger underneath her chin and mouths a ‘pop’ sound.

Dean raises his chin in defiance, even as the two holding him force him down to his knees. “My dad is going to _kill you_. It doesn’t matter what you are. He’ll figure out a way and he’ll kill you, because that’s what he does.”

None of the angels heed him. “It isn’t guaranteed anymore,” Castiel is saying. “You can’t harm him. There’s a Mandate.”

“There isn’t anything anymore, because of you,” Armisael replies. “So if breaking a few fingers or toes is required—” Calabriel obliges; Dean cries out and doubles over around his broken hand “—then, well, I’m willing to give it a go.”

Castiel shoves against Arathon’s grip, to little effect. “ _Stop_.”

Armisael seizes Castiel by the collar and drags him back to his feet, only to send him down again with a fist in his stomach. His words are a cold, resentful confession as Castiel doubles over: “I have no compassion for you. Tell me what you did and how to fix it, or we remove the arm altogether.”

Ahead of him, Dean makes a pitiable retching noise and spits against the carpet.

“The Fate came to me,” Castiel replies, low and hoarse and loathing. “Lachesis. She told me there was no record of me from that moment on. That it was the work of someone more powerful than her. She didn’t know who. _That is all I know._ ”

Dean goes quiet. Armisael releases Castiel, and he drops to a knee. From this vantage he can see Dean kneeling with his forehead to the floor, breathing in wet gasps and quiet little hitching sobs.

He has to get him out.

He needs time and distance to banish them. Castiel doesn’t know how he’s going to get that, but he’ll need blood, as well. Slipping the rock from his pocket, he settles it into his palm and regains his feet.

It’s only two steps to Calabriel, and neither Arathon or Armisael move to stop him.

The rock cuts surprisingly deep when he slams his fist against the jaw of the angel responsible for Dean’s injuries.

Arathon, who has settled down into the front pew, raises an eyebrow. Saviel whistles. Calabriel draws his blade in rebuttal, but Armisael stops him with a sharp word.

“No record of you?” Armisael asks. “What does this mean? I don’t understand.”

Castiel eyes Calabriel, daring him on as he returns the bloodied rock to his pocket. He balls his bleeding hand into a fist. Calabriel sneers and sheaths his sword.

“That I am ‘outside her jurisdiction’,” Castiel answers. “My actions are no longer governed by the Fates. Not until March 24th.”

“That's less than two weeks. In two weeks’ time nothing will have changed,” Armisael says.

“No,” Arathon says. “I don’t think so, no. Things have already changed.”

Saviel steps away from Dean, resting an elbow on the pulpit. “How can someone be ‘outside the Fates’ jurisdiction’? Not even Michael is above prophecy.”

“And yet.” Arathon gestures to the ceiling.

“The future changed as soon as Lachesis departed,” Castiel answers. “I didn’t have to do anything.”

“The past is already written,” Arathon argues. “You can’t duck away from it as you choose.”

“What if,” Calabriel posits, slowly, as he thinks over the words, “this isn’t our past?”

Saviel finishes his thought. “We’re not beyond Fate, we’re just beyond our Fate. And Castiel cut across, one to the other?”

“Another world,” Calabriel muses.

Blood is pooling thick in his palm. Castiel clenches his fist tighter to stem the flow.

Armisael protests. “How would we get here, if it’s Castiel’s doing?”

“We were pursuing him,” Saviel supplies. “Watching where he was going, rather than where we were.”

“We could return the same way,” Arathon concludes.

Saviel is looking towards Castiel, sharply curious. “Can you see it?”

Castiel shakes his head, impatient. "What?"

“Oh, you know. The moment we left. The moment when he—” Again she mimes a gun, this time towards Dean’s head.

Of course he can. That gaping moment, looming at the back of his mind.

The answer must be plain enough on his face. Saviel smiles. “You can, can’t you.”Castiel moves toward her, fist raised, but she just raises her hands in a gesture that is equal parts surrender and challenge. “You can see it. Which means you can lead us back.”

Castiel relents, dropping his fist before the blood can slip down his wrist. “You could be wrong,” he mutters, stepping back towards Dean. “This could be our past.”

“But think of how messy that would be,” Calabriel muses. “If you were to—”

Saviel cuts him short. “ _Who_ would do this? Castiel can’t. He’s raggedy as they come.”

Armisael silences her with a gesture. “Perhaps you are right, sister. It would only be possibly by the Grace of God.”

Castiel looks towards Armisael. “What are you saying?”

“Perhaps this is his Mandate after all - an opportunity to recover something which was lost.”

Castiel’s expression unravels into dumb shock. “You can’t.”

“Oh? But what have you been trying to accomplish?” Armisael smiles thinly. “I mean to take a vessel back to our most esteemed brother, yes, and wish him well in wearing it. If not for your interference, he would have no need of a spare.” He steps back. “Two weeks, that’s no time at all. Arathon, if you would be so kind as to find us more suitable lodgings.”

Arathon rises and steps out the church doors and into the rain. The opposition narrows to three, but that is still three too many. Castiel regards Armisael with flat hatred. “I won’t help you return. Not if you intend to take him.”

“I doubt you’ll have much say in the matter, if the Fates will it to be so.”

“Why would they? If it’s as you say - if this is another time - this child belongs _here_. On this path.”

“This child defied the very God that saved him, burned the prophecies, and then destroyed himself before we had any opportunity to extract either repentance or revenge.”

“The _man_ did that,” Castiel rages, “and the man is dead. You had your opportunity. And you _failed_.”

Armisael's expression twists into a loathing sneer at the reminder. “And I’ll see to it that this one doesn’t grow the same.”

“What makes you think he’ll bow to you?”

“Because.” Armisael stands over Dean, whose forehead is still pressed into the floorboards. With the toe of his shined shoe he lifts Dean’s chin so that Castiel can see the tears around his eyes and the anger in his teeth. “He already has.”

“You’re a fool,” Castiel spits. Armisael pays him no mind, but Calabriel - his cheek still burning a dull red - is watching him closely.

Dean jerks away from Armisael’s foot and pushes up onto his knees, glaring at all in the room. His cast is splintered. He cradles his hand protectively against his chest, but anger seems to have pushed him past the pain.

Castiel shoves past Armisael, kneeling before Dean. Calabriel tenses, but Armisael knows he has nowhere to go; he makes no move to intervene. Castiel gestures towards Dean’s bad hand. He does his best to sound gentle. “Let me see.”

Meanwhile, he digs fingernails deep into his bleeding palm to get the blood flowing fresh. When he can feel it pooling against his fingertips he drops his hand to the floorboards.

“Get away from me.” Dean tries to pull back, but Calabriel doesn’t leave him much room.

Castiel regards him levelly. “You need to trust me.”

“You get the hell away from me.” Dean’s eyes are bright with hatred and tears. He sniffles and wipes his nose with an arm. “My Dad’ll hunt you to the ends of the Earth, and he’ll kill you. All of you. He’ll never stop, and you’ll regret the day you ever messed with me.”

Castiel hunches his shoulders, dropping his head low. It’s a motion of defeat, but it provides the last cover he needs as he hastily - and blindly - finishes the sigil he’s sketching out across the floorboards.

Dean’s breath hitches in confusion. “Are you bleeding?”

Armisael’s feet scuffle. An iron grip is crushing into his shoulder, but too late. Castiel presses down on the sigil at his feet. Brilliant light sears the air, leaving the taste of ozone in its wake.

The angels are gone.

Castiel seizes Dean’s shirt and hauls him to his feet. “ _Run._ ”

Dean pushes to his feet and skids down the steps for the discarded knife. He trips before he’s halfway down the aisle, too busy looking around the church and not watching his feet. Castiel hauls him upright by the collar of his shirt, forcing Dean towards the door.

The rain is pouring down in sheets beyond the church doors. Outside of the church’s wards, he can spread his wings. He grabs Dean by the back of the neck and moves: slick mud gives way to jarringly arid Arizona asphalt. The dark neighborhood street is abandoned at this late hour. Before Dean can orient, Castiel spins him and presses a hand against Dean’s ribs. He calls to mind the necessary runes to hide Dean’s soul, burning them deep into the bone.

Dean, the essence of him, disappears.

Dean takes a deep breath - it hurts, no doubt - but Castiel doesn’t have time for pity or explanation. He shoves them forward one more time, and they are sinking up to their knees in the snows of the White Mountains.

It’s all Castiel can do to keep his legs beneath him. He is breathless with the exertion, and by the rising noise in his ears his vessel is preparing to lose consciousness. He focuses on the fist still tightly wrapped in Dean’s shirt, and forces out orders in short huffs: “Stay here. Stay down. I’ll be back.”

Arathon - the only angel not blown back into the space between spaces with the banishment sigil - will pursue him. He can’t stay.

He is barely aware of where he jumps: blindly following one throng of humans to the next, through the back alleys of Boston and Worcester. A single thrum of bass music that sets his aching ribcage humming; the acrid taste of cigarettes.

He lands near where he began, knee-deep in ice-crusted snow. He struggles towards the black trunk of a pine and presses first his hands, and then his thrumming forehead to its scaled bark.

His knees give.

Time slips.

He comes back to himself in a full-bodied shudder. There’s pine bark digging into the side of his head, and he’s struggling to breathe. His nose is clotted with blood, and his right side lights with bright sparks with every dragging breath. He wipes absently at his face and struggles to his feet. Arathon is nowhere near, searching somewhere near the Boston outskirts.

Closer, a child’s tinny shouts echo off the pine.

Castiel moves through the snow one stumbling step at a time, fighting at the weight of it in slow, stumbling thrusts of exhausted muscles. He doesn’t know how long it takes him to reach Dean, but by the time he does, the thin shouts for help have shortened to thin, pitiful barks.

Castiel seizes Dean’s t-shirt in numb fingers and drags him close. “ _Quiet._ ”

Dean twists around, and Castiel hears the thin ripping sound of fabric tearing. The knife - edge bloodied - is balanced in Dean's shaking hands. Whatever the damage done, Castiel is too numb to feel it. He grabs at Dean's collar with one hand and seizes at the knife with the other. With a sharp twist he is tearing the weapon free and tossing it aside. It disappears in a small plume of snow.

Panting raggedly, Dean twists and flails wildly in a clumsy effort to free himself. He screams out with a renewed vigor - “Help— _help!_ ” - and Castiel does his best to reel him back, to quiet him. In their struggle they both fall, wallowing weakly in the snow.

For a time, they are both motionless, panting raggedly in the cold. Castiel regains his feet first. Balling a fist in the back of Dean’s collar, he begins the slow, dragging ascent. The boy is either too cold or too wise to resist. He no longer has the breath to shout.

The cabin was within view, before Dean stumbled his way nearly a hundred yards down the mountain slope. Regaining the elevation now, through the knee-deep snow, is a torture punctuated by Dean’s renewed hypothermic struggles. Castiel allows the child his flailing - waits, puffing the frigid air, his fingers tight in the boy’s collar - and then keeps walking.

It is with the last strength of screaming muscles that he breaks the rusted lock on the cabin door and propels Dean through into the shadows beyond. The streak of snow left in Dean’s path is the only spot of brightness in the cramped, unlit room. Castiel shoves the door closed behind them, enclosing them in the musty dark.

Dean stumbles towards a cot, set in the cabin’s cobwebbed corner.

Castiel drops his shoulders against the only door and presses a hand against the cut that has begun to burn on his side. Slowly, he slides down to the floorboards.

After that, he is only aware of the cold.

 

 

END ACT II, CHAPTER THREE


	7. gone still

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> standing still | sammy talks back | the past repeats

His breath spreads silver fingers across the metal shelves as he scans the rows and rows of neatly typed labels.

Foreign names, the ones that had spilled from a frightened doctor’s mouth: _Azithromycin. Levofloxacin. Piperacillin-tazobactam. Azithromycin. Levofloxacin—_

He mumbles the words, numb fingers fumbling at bottle after bottle after bottle. He finds one - azithromycin - and shoves two of the bottles into his coat pocket. Levofloxacin is a small white box that clinks from the glass vials within.

Fingers dig into the back of his neck.

Castiel jerks forward, but his head doesn’t meet cold metal shelves with the dull snap of a shattering cheekbone. The hospital pharmacy has collapsed into a dark wooden floor, wet with half-thawed snow. He presses a hand to the splintered boards, disoriented. The snow burns against fingers already half-frozen.

He looks up. The cabin is brighter than when he’d slipped into sleep, but dawn’s light does it little favors. This backwoods cabin is as cramped as he remembers, and somehow it’s in worse condition twenty years in the past. A cot, a woodstove, and a small kitchenette are enough to fill the shack, which creaks and groans under the gentlest push of wind.

The boy is still here. He’s curled up on the cot on the opposite side of the room. The fresh scratches in the floor indicate that he purposefully dragged it there to allow the best view of Castiel - and to put the most space between them.

Dean’s pulled what blankets he could find onto him, but Castiel can still see him shivering beneath them, each exhale forming a drifting cloud.

Good. He’s alive, then.

Castiel pushes to his feet. There’s a rusting woodstove in the middle of the room, seated on a concrete pad. It looks to have been years since Rufus Turner last made use of this safehouse, but he’s left a small stockpile of wood set against the wall. Castiel begins loading the stove with dry tinder. It’s slow and clumsy work, his muscles too cold to react adequately. At last he has enough stacked within to coax a small fire into being beneath the pile. He leaves the door cracked and settles back into a kneel, waiting for the gentle pull of oxygen to do its work.

The fresh memory of the pharmacy has left a sharp metallic taste on his tongue.

He is tired.

The fire is crackling hungrily, now, reaching up into the higher logs. Castiel closes the stove door and rises with a grimace. The shallow cut Dean had carved in Castiel’s side while they struggled in the snow is already closed, but he can still feel the grind of fractured bone where Arathon had damaged his ribs.

He drags a chair from the kitchen table towards the cabin’s only door and settles back down, shoulders against the door frame. The woodstove is doing its work. Already, the cramped room feels warmer against his face, drawing a low ache out of his joints.

He closes his eyes, and the fire’s warmth blooms into the heavy weight of Missouri summer. The cabin smells of must, and blood, and fever; and he staggers over the threshold with pained slowness, the jagged edges of the shattered doorframe catching on his sleeve.

Empty.

The safehouse is empty.

He’d knelt there, beside the threadbare couch, forehead pressed against the burn of Dean’s cheek, a murmured promise, _I_ _’m coming back._

It’s empty.

Gone; Dean’s _gone_ , they’ve taken him—

No. No- the Impala is gone, as well, and there’s a sigil on the wall. Days old, cracked and faded to a rusted brown, Dean’s handprint at its center.

He stumbles to the counter and begins carding through the chaos there, scattered with half-consumed MREs, bloodied gauze, the innards of their first aid kit.

An edge of black, sticking out from beneath an upturned mug. He shoves the mug aside and unearths a playing card. It’s the Two of Spades, from the Winchesters’ mongrel deck of cards; this one of Playboy origin, bent, dog-eared, and decorated with a woman wearing very little at all.

Written in the corner in Dean’s scrawl: _walkr._

Metal whines and squeaks.

Castiel breathes silver into New Hampshire chill and blinks owlishly across the room. The boy is shifting restlessly beneath his cocoon of blankets, twisting to pressing his face into the pillow. Castiel rises slowly to his feet, crossing the room.

The collar of Dean’s shirt is damp, from sweat or from melted snow, likely both. Dean trembles. The blankets are thin but the boy’s face is flushed, hot beneath his palm.

Castiel withdraws his hand and sways to his feet. For the length of two breaths he is still, feeling the cold weight of the mountains at his back. The boy is sick.

_Azithromycin. Levofloxacin—_

There’s a small foot locker beneath the kitchen table. MREs, first aid kit, a spare wool blanket. The kit has morphine, ibuprofen, and penicillin, all years out of date. He pockets the morphine. It’s expired, but it's still enough to floor an adult. The ibuprofen is safer for a child, and it could still have some potency, but the penicillin—

He slams the locker shut.

There’s a tin cup in the sink. He opens the door enough to pack the cup to the rim with snow; he leaves the cup to melt next to Dean’s cot.

He stokes the fire to a roar and spreads the wool blanket across the boy. Upon second consideration, he shrugs out of his outer jacket and spreads it across Dean’s huddled form as well, as though the fever can be smothered like some errant flame.

What else is he to do?

He settles back into the chair, and waits.

++++

The first time Dean wakes up violently: coughing like he’s trying to lose a lung. He turns a bit and jostles his hand, which just makes the situation worse because he gasps at the sudden shock of pain and then chokes further on whatever he was trying to cough up in the first place. He ends up doubled over off the cot’s edge, gasping and spitting and hacking until his face turns red and he sags against the cot’s frame.

The second time Dean wakes up, he’s so tired that he doesn’t want to move, except that he’s cold. His bones are cold and his skin is cold and his tongue feels thick in his mouth. He rolls his head a bit and blinks at the thin strips of orange where a fire’s burning in the woodstove. He wants to drag the cot closer, but just trying to rise incites a coughing fit that wracks his whole body and makes his hand angry, and afterward he buries his face in the musty blankets and sleeps again.

The third time, Dean wants his dad. He hurts all over and his hand radiates a general unhappiness and his neck is sore from resting at an awkward angle and his arms and legs tremble with a chill he can’t seem to shake no matter how tightly he pulls the blanket against him and he’s thirsty and nauseated and all he can think to do is call out “Dad?” in the most woeful, self-pitying tone he thinks he’s ever made.

There’s a hand pressing against his forehead, cold. It withdraws after only a few seconds.

“Dad,” Dean says again, and he doesn’t know why he’s crying, but he is. He thinks he might have had bad dreams. He can taste them on the back of his throat. “Dad, Dad, Dad.”

There’s the sound of slow footsteps going away from him. Somewhere off to Dean’s right, pills rattle in a bottle. Then the footsteps slowly return, and a voice that isn’t Dad’s waits for Dean to quiet down before it says: “You should take these.”

Dean turns his head away and presses his face against the blanket. “No, no, I want my dad.”

There’s quiet for a moment. “This will make your hand hurt less.”

“It doesn’t hurt,” he says, even though that’s a lie. “I want my dad.”

The voice doesn’t say anything.

The fourth time Dean wakes up he realizes several things in rapid succession: firstly, that his hand needs to be reset, secondly, that he is sick, and thirdly, that this is not Uncle Bobby’s cabin. He’s exhausted and his arm shakes when he tries to push himself upright, but he manages to get his bare feet down to the cold floor.

The high school kid looks dead. Dean might believe he is, except that he’s not in the same position he was when Dean fell asleep. He’s sitting in a chair against the door, legs sprawled in front of him, one arm wrapped around his chest. There’s old flecks of dried blood on his sweatshirt where Dean had cut him.

Dean would finish the job, except the knife, he lost it in the snow—

He slumps back against the wall and presses a hand to his own chest. There’s this popping sound down in the bottom of one of his lung when he breathes, a lot like Rice Krispies. He thinks he might have a fever, too, and his hand is swollen painfully around the remaining shards of his cast.

Escape would be easier, now that it’s daylight. Better chances of being spotted by a park ranger or a hunter. He could make a toboggan, maybe, if there’s a bit of tarp lying around. He wouldn’t have to walk - he could slide downhill. He couldn’t see before, in the dark, but he got a sense that they were way up, some mountain somewhere. It might be a long way to civilization, but better than sitting here.

Dad said he’d always find Dean, no matter what; and he _will_ , because Dad’s the best hunter Dean’s ever heard of. But he also said he couldn’t do it alone, that people needed to help him to help them, not just give up or wait to be saved. Dean’s trying; he tried to hold out for Dad in Bobby’s basement, and he tried to run away in that church, and when the guy left him on the mountainside he tried to call for help but nobody had heard, nobody had come, and Dean _doesn_ _’t know what to do._

Dean’s breath hitches and the weird popping in his lung bubbles up into a froth and he doubles over, trying not to cough and failing miserably. It comes out in wet, guttural barks of sound, and goes so long that his eyes water and he thinks he might choke, but he doesn’t. He spits and rolls over in misery.

“The closest person is ten and a half miles,” the kid says in his weird gravelly voice. “The snow, by my estimation, is three feet deep. More, here and there.” He hasn’t moved. His eyes are open, though, and he’s watching Dean closely.

Dean wheezes and slides back further, as far as he can go. His back hits the wall. “What do you want with me?”

The kid closes his eyes again. His arm curls tighter around his ribs. “I don’t want anything.” After a while he adds, “It would be best to set your hand before it swells any further.”

“You’re the one—” Dean has to pause for another bout of coughs “—who broke it.”

“You punched me,” he mutters.

“And the second time?” Dean argues back. He can still hear it, the grind and snap of breaking plaster and jagged glass-edge bones.

The kid stirs at that. He looks a little lost, at first, and then his expression tightens down into a scowl. “Don’t associate me with them,” he says, cold and low. “I would have killed them if I could.”

“Yeah?” Dean glares back at him. “My dad’ll have you all killed.”

He doesn’t say anything to that. He just sits back, expressionless.

Dean lets his head fall back against the wall and breathes as deeply as he can without inciting more coughs. It’s cold away from the fire, but he doesn’t want to get any closer to the kid-thing than he has to. Instead he wraps the blankets tighter around him and sniffles miserably.

He notices that there’s a bottle of ibuprofen and a tin cup of water set out right in front of him on the floor.

His eyes dart to the half-dead person in the corner and back again. Who else would have put it there? Dean certainly didn’t. But his pride won’t let him take it, even if his throat’s parched and the ibuprofen would help.

 _Probably poisoned, anyway,_ he thinks savagely.

“It isn’t poisoned,” the kid says.

“You _say_ that.”

“If I wanted you dead, I would have left you with Armisael.”

“If you wanted me alive you would’ve left me _alone_.”

What do monsters do with their victims? Dean never thought to ask. They always ended up dead, anyway.

“They’d be happy to have you,” the kid mutters, mostly to himself.

“I want to go _home._ ”

The kid stares at him but doesn’t speak. His expression is unreadable.

Dean stares back. His head throbs and his throat stings and his face burns and the rest of him shivers and he _does_ want the kid dead, he tries to pour all of that into hate but instead it bleeds into general misery and fear. He shivers and draws his knees in, careful with the throbbing hand, and tries to keep his eyes open enough to watch the kid.

But he’s tired, and sick, and sleep is so inviting.

“I hate you,” he mumbles, fighting to stay awake. “I want to go home.”

 

 

Dad keeps searching. The house, the yard, over and over; and Sam follows behind, a shadow, hands fisted up in his pajamas.

When Dad goes outside, Sam sits on the steps with Rumsfeld, the concrete burning cold through his socks. The big dumb dog lays his head in Sam’s lap and sleeps, and even though sometimes the way Dad yells Dean’s name makes Sam cry Rumsfeld doesn’t seem to mind. He licks at Sam’s face until he stops crying, and then he puts his head back down and goes back to sleep.

Dad isn’t paying any attention to Sam except to make sure Sam’s there. Sam tries to ask him questions, when he’s standing still long enough for him to ask. He asks him what the man was. Dad doesn’t answer that he was a monster. He just says “Sam, not now.” He asks what’s going to happen to Dean. Dad tells Sam to stop asking questions.

By mid-afternoon, the sun’s been swallowed up by a thick sheet of clouds and Sam is sitting in the armchair again and thinking that he’s tired in a gray, hazy kind of way. He hears Uncle Bobby’s truck pulls in. He knows it’s Bobby because of how the truck whines; the Impala never whines. Dad says the Impala purrs, like a wimpy house cat, but Sam thinks it _rumbles_ , like one of those big jungle cats. 

He wonders what the Impala will be like without Dean to crawl over the front seat and play cards with him, and tries not to think about it.

Bobby looks tired, big dark raccoon circles under his eyes. He gives Sam a hug and asks if Sam is okay, but it doesn’t make Sam feel any better. He just mumbles that he is and looks down at his socks, gray with dust.

Bobby and Dad talk in the office for awhile. They close the door, and Sam sits at the kitchen table and picks at the peeling edge where formica meets aluminum. Sometimes Dad’s voice gets loud, almost a yell, but Sam can’t understand what they’re saying, and he doesn’t want to. He wants them to go find Dean, and bring him back. 

He tells himself that it’d be okay if they left him here with the big dumb dog, he wouldn’t be scared or anything - he just wants them to bring Dean back.

When they’re done talking, Uncle Bobby goes upstairs to take a shower and Dad makes dinner. It’s just peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Sam tries to eat it, because Dad never cooks anything and Dean always tells him to shut up and eat if Dad makes something, but he only gets a bite before his stomach starts taking somersaults. He sips his milk, instead.

“Sam,” Dad says in his tired voice. He hasn’t even touched the sandwich on his own plate so Sam doesn’t think he’s in trouble for not being hungry. “Do you want something else? I could make you some eggs, or pancakes.”

“No, m’okay.” He picks at his sandwich’s crust and admits, “I’m not hungry.”

“C’mere, Sammy.” Dad gestures for Sam to come around to where he’s sitting. He does, and Dad puts his elbows on his knees and leans forward so they’re about the same height.

When Dad puts his hands on Sam’s shoulders, Sam knows it’s going to be a grown-up talk and Dad’s going to ask him to do something he doesn’t want to.

“Are you gonna go look for Dean?” Sam asks, before Dad can say anything.

“I am.”

He tries to stand up as tall as he can. “I wanna help.”

Dad smiles, but it’s not a happy smile. “I’ll be alright. Your Uncle Bobby will need all the help he can get running the scrap yard.”

Sam’s face drops. The scrap yard doesn't matter. This is _Dean_. “Uncle Bobby can help too. And Pastor Jim, too, maybe, and Mr. Caleb, and _everybody_ …”

It’s like Dad doesn’t even hear what he says, though. He just keeps talking. “You do whatever he asks while I’m gone, okay? It won’t be more than a couple of days.”

Sam shakes his head, listening but not really listening. “Dad, I can help. I can… I can read, and stuff, I understand almost all of the newspaper now, and I can make posters and things…” He’s seen those for dogs and cats and things, not for kids, but he thinks it would work.

“You can make all the posters you like, but I want you to do it here.”

“Why?” Sam’s voice is rising, and it’s getting that squeaky edge that he hates. It makes him feel small. “Why can’t I come with you? Where are you gonna look?”

“I’m going to Illinois, and you’re staying because I said so, Sam.” Dad stands up and takes the plates off the table. “I’ll be back in a few days, and I expect you to do as Singer says while I’m gone. No playing in the yard, no wandering off. I want you within sight at all times, d’you hear?”

That’s the tone that means Sam’s supposed to nod and say ‘yes, sir’ and nothing else. But it’s like Dad’s barely even listening, like he doesn’t even care. So he just stands there and doesn’t say anything back, because if Dad doesn’t have to listen to him, why does he have to listen to Dad?

Dad stares at him a minute, and Sam stares back, and then Dad sets his teeth with a click. “If there’s anything you need out of the car, you best get it now.”

Sam doesn’t answer. Instead he asks, “Why do you have to look all by yourself?”

“This is not a discussion. If you want it, get it out of the car now, before I go.”

“I don’t have anything,” Sam says, in the tone Dad hates, the one he calls ‘talking back’. Sam doesn’t care.

Dad hears it, too, ‘cause he dumps the dishes in the sink with a slam. “Good.” He grabs his jacket off the chair in the library. “I’ll call when I get there.”

He doesn’t wait for Sam to answer. He doesn’t even look at Sam, really. Which is fine, Sam thinks, because he’s mad, and he hopes Dad is mad too. 

But then the door slams, and the Impala starts, and Sam can hear it as the car pulls out and away. The second that low rumble fades off, all that prickly hot anger drains out of him. He lied to himself when he thought he wouldn’t be scared. He is. He’s scared that the man will come back. He’s scared that the man might take Dad too, or that Dad won’t find Dean. 

He doesn’t want Dad to be mad at him, he wants Dad to come back, because the only ones who can make the bad things stay away are Dad and Dean and now they’re both gone.

Uncle Bobby walks downstairs then, and his wet hair is sticking up at funny angles that Sam barely notices. “Your daddy take off? Sam?”

Sam nods mutely and sniffs, swiping his nose on his sleeve.

“You okay, son?”

Sam nods again, even though his throat’s closing up with the rising tears. He wants Dad. He wants Dean. He doesn’t want Uncle Bobby to rustle his hair and say, “Alright. If you say so. You look wiped. Let’s get you settled on the couch, okay?” He doesn’t want _any_ of it. But he follows Bobby to the couch and Bobby puts a whole pile of blankets on him and leaves him to go to sleep without making him shower or brush his teeth or anything.

After Bobby goes, Sam rolls on his side and curls up into a ball, pulling the blankets up high over his head. He cries until he feels like he’s going to be sick. Eventually, he falls asleep.

 

 

Coughing hurts.

His hand radiates hot agony with every movement. His chest feels like there are iron bands wrapped around it. His throat feels like ribbons, it’s so dry.

“Dad?” he whispers. He’s curled on his side, facing the warmth of the woodstove; with the pad of a finger he traces the rusted metal of the cot frame near his eye. There are dangerous things here, so he doesn’t dare raise his voice above a whisper, but he asks again, “Dad? Are you coming?”

Another cough shudders through him. He ducks his face into the crook of his shoulder; when he looks there’s a gross, phelgmy residue left on the sleeve of his tee.

The tin cup is back. Dean reaches for it, but his fingers crash into the cup and tip it over, spilling it all across the floorboards.

He could cry. Maybe he will in a little while; maybe it will make him feel better.

He’s hot.

His skin is so hot he thinks the air might be rippling around him. And he’s hungry, and thirsty, and he needs to take a piss. The older kid is still here, with his pale face and his bloody sweatshirt, and he’s moved a bit since Dean last saw him. But he’s still now, so Dean thinks it’s safe enough to move.

There’s a jacket on top of his pile of blankets, still damp at the cuffs. He recognizes it as the kid’s. Even with the heat seeping out of his skin he’s gonna be cold, outside; he pulls it on over his sweat-soaked t-shirt.

When he stands up, the room tilts and spins. He crashes back down and the force of his fall reverberates through his bones all the way down to his fingers and makes him grit his teeth and whine through his clenched jaw until he can breathe past the pain again. He decides it’s safer to stay low to the ground, so he tucks the empty tin cup into his jacket pocket and scoots across the floor instead, keeping his bad hand tucked close against his chest and leaving a wide berth around his corpse-like companion.

The door is tricky. The creature moved the chair, a little, so he can get the door open, but Dean still has to go within an arms’ reach of him to get outside. Dean proceeds slowly, watching for any signs of wakefulness, but there are none. The face is colorless and impassive, with just the slightest furrow of the eyebrows. Dean’s not even sure he’s _breathing_.

He pulls the doorknob from as far away as he can manage, and waits until the door is fully open and all creaking has stopped before he dares slide any closer. The snow is scalding cold against his bare feet, but it’s cool and perfect against his throat when he cups a handful of it for eating.

Dean uses the door jamb to help himself up, and staggers towards a tree to relieve himself. Then he seats himself just outside the door and packs a mound of snow around his injured hand so that it resembles its own kind of cast, and he leans back against the wall and rests.

The cold slices through his clothing immediately, but it’s a balm against the swollen paw that his hand has become. He sits like that for awhile, quaking with fever-chills and coughing that awful barking cough that tears at his lungs like they’re dried parchment.

He closes his eyes only for a moment - just a blink - and when he opens them again a snow flurry has started and it’s dusted his nose and the blanket with a thick layer of flakes that glisten in the moonlight. Dean shakes the snow free, packs the cup with fresh snow and retreats back inside. His hand, for once, doesn’t complain at the movement.

On clumsy, frozen feet he explores the cabin, chattering and shivering as he goes. He notes the first aid kit sitting open on the little kitchen table, and a dusty stack of MREs. He glances back at the still body propped against the wall. Then he plucks up the first MRE and collects the bottle of ibuprofen and settles down by the fire. There’s no certainty that the ibuprofen hasn’t been tampered with, but he’ll risk it. The MRE is still sealed.

He tries to dry-swallow the pills but they get stuck in his throat. He coughs and swallows and nearly retches before he gets them down. After that he loses some of his appetite. He sets the MRE aside and pulls the cot free from its niche against the wall, setting it closer to the woodstove, one wary eye on the still figure by the door.

After the cold, the heat from the fire makes everything pleasantly warm and fuzzy. He tucks the bottle of ibuprofen next to his bad hand and puts the MRE between his knees and settles into the cot to watch the flames dance behind the iron grate.

Sam and Pastor Jim must have sat just like this when they were making s’mores. Dean misses Sammy. Dad says they’re not supposed to be around each other if one of them is sick, but Sam would climb in bed with him anyway, they could both fit on the cot if Dean scooted over a bit. Sam would wrap himself around Dean like he always does, which is obnoxious most of the time, but right now he’d really like to have Sam tucked up next to him to keep the chill and the chattering teeth away.

He plucks at the crumbly edges of the MRE - french toast, supposedly - and tries to nibble a corner, but it’s so dry it almost sets him coughing again. He can still taste the bitter dust of the ibuprofen on his tongue, and the melted snow only makes it worse, but he drinks the rest of it in small sips.

He wants more water, but the cup is empty and the door is far. Dean sets the cup by the fire and retreats back into his blankets, watching the high school kid just- sit there. For awhile he thinks the kid might even be dreaming: brow tightening, lips moving in a wordless murmur. After a few minutes, the dream passes, and the kid is back to his old statue self. Dean sniffs and drags the blankets up higher. 

If Dad would come. Dad’ll come, he’s sure. But Dean doesn’t want to wait anymore. He’s tired. He’s very tired, and he misses Sam, and he wants to have a warm bed and chicken soup and for his hand not to hurt so much and for Dad to tell him it’ll be okay.

There isn’t anything like that, here.

++++

Castiel doesn’t dream. His kind do not dream.

In the weeks after Wichita, Dean - _his_ Dean - had never spoken Sam’s name in waking, only in sleep. Castiel had never followed him down those corridors, but he knows what he would’ve seen: a parking lot, shattered glass, and Sam - Sam’s last moments, pieced together from imperfect fragments of human memory.

His kind don’t dream, but their memories are flawless.

He can recall every frayed and worn edge of the Impala’s steering wheel as he had distanced them from their last hunt, Dean’s mumbled, profanity-laced critiques of Castiel’s driving fading into incoherence as the morphine did its work. He can trace the edges of the gunshot wound that had nearly killed him - a 19 mm round to the leg, deceptive in its simplicity. The wound seemed clean, through-and-through, no bullet to remove, but the infection sank deep and spread rapidly, far beyond the reach of their meager field trauma kit.

He remembers Dean’s every word in the days of fever that had followed. Dean confused Castiel in turn for Sam, and Bobby Singer, and John Winchester; a parade of dead men, haunting every corner of Dean’s fevered mind. Yet it was worse, somehow, when Dean would catch his sleeve in passing and murmur, _Cas_.

 _Sorry_ , Dean said with a grimaced smile, and Castiel remembers every line of his face. _Lousy company, right?_

As Dean’s condition deteriorated, those moments of coherence grew fewer and farther between.

Seven days. It was seven days before he had no choice but to risk flight; the blood poisoning was climbing towards artery, and heart. He remembers the ache in his wings, stiff with disuse; the dry taste of rubbing alcohol within the pharmacy where he had threatened and cajoled a list of appropriate treatments out of a doctor who knelt at his feet, hands raised in supplication and fear.

He took what he needed, and the medications worked; the infection retreated, and Dean came back to him.

 _The first thing we’re doing when I get off this shitty couch_ , Dean had informed Castiel, _is getting Chinese food_. He crafted a very particular list of his demands, and insisted Castiel recite it back word-for-word. 

Castiel did not think that there were many Chinese restaurants were left, certainly not any that could possibly supply the feast Dean had in mind, but he promised to do his best.

The medications ran out. Dean slipped back into delirium and fevered sleep. Castiel had knelt close and promised: _I’m coming back_.

He hadn't wanted to leave. He had lingered in indecision on the safehouse’s threshold, and he had thought - absurd, in his present situation - of how small Dean had looked. But what else could he do?

What else?

He left, and sealed their fates. 

He has crafted a dozen excuses for why he returned to the same pharmacy: he was desperate, tired, distracted. His range limited by fading grace. Resources had grown limited; many major hospitals had been ransacked. This was one he knew to be intact. But he thinks, most of all, that he was complacent. With the war in full swing he had not been pursued by angels in months, and did not even consider the implications of retracing his steps.

It cost him everything.

Castiel was lying on his back in the hospital hallway, wreathed in broken glass, when he saw his brother’s face in full. Arathon had only spoken a single question: _Where is the Righteous Man, Castiel?_

He answered only in breathless supplication: _Arathon, please._

It was not the answer Arathon sought. He did not bother to ask again.

He worked with his hands: tore ligament, shattered bone. Fractures along familiar lines, Castiel realizes, as he curls his fingers against the grating edges of bones that have only begun to knit. Arathon found that weakness and exploited it, again, again, again, until the ribs gave and his vessel’s lung had collapsed, and Castiel sputtered a froth of blood across waxed linoleum.

And then, Arathon had stepped back. He had let Castiel run.

But Castiel did not go to Dean. He sank to his knees on the cracked concrete of a South Dakota sidewalk, and Arathon stood over him, mouth set in a thin frown. In the stutter-step haze of the space between consciousness and sleep, Arathon’s face was rapidly consumed by crowding faces and pressing hands, spouting a confused babble of queries and last rites and shouts for help. Castiel curled in a loose comma around his ruined chest and waited for an end.

He lost days to the slow drip of an IV and the thin haze of narcotics. Too many days. When he returned to the safehouse, Dean was gone and the sigil on the wall was long dried. There was only the card, directing him to the next location, the next safehouse - _walkr_. Texas.

By the time he reached there, it was another empty room.

For weeks, he chased Dean across corrupted voicemails, cryptic dead drops and abandoned rooms. Dog-eared playing cards grew thick in his pocket in their disjointed chase across decaying backroads. Empty safehouse after empty safehouse; every planned rendezvous cut short or diverted as the war’s chaotic reach spread to obscure Dean’s path. 

In the end, Armisael’s unit closed the gap.

The prayer was a single breathed syllable, snagging him as simply as Dean’s fingers snaring in his coat sleeve: _Cas._

He rushed from the cloying heat of an abandoned Kansas bus stop into the sharp taste of cordite.

 _Can you see it?_ Saviel had asked him, in a Kentucky church.

Time is a river, fluid and unrelenting. Castiel has always known the vague constellation of moments that his path would follow, but he did not know, until he stepped into that place, that all his eons of existence would hang upon that moment.

By the time he arrived, the echoes of the Colt’s final shot had passed. Armisael and his closest few stood a silent sigil around their failure, hands loose at their sides. The flood of lifeblood from mouth and nose and ears had slowed to a trickle, and the last static sparks of Dean Winchester’s soul had faded. The last Castiel knew of Dean Winchester was the slow, crooked arrhythmia of his heart as it stuttered through its last confused attempts at life. 

A scrap of paper was clutched in Dean’s hand. Castiel must admit a flaw in his memory, here: he does not remember picking it up. He does not remember any willful acts, in that moment: just his knees upon cold pavement.

He remembers the brush of Arathon’s hand on his shoulder. He remembers striking out blindly. And then he fled.

Before the full weight of that sight could settle on him, he wrapped his fingers around a piece of Fate’s book and flung himself into the past, and he has not stopped since. Not until now. 

There is a gaping emptiness behind him and a narrowing tunnel of uncertainty ahead, and he stands motionless in-between. Waiting.

Try as he does to focus his mind elsewhere - on the slow, rattling breaths of the child in front of him, or the low mutter of the fire - his thoughts are dragged inexorably back to every moment, every movement, looking for that fatal mistake, that moment where Dean’s path became inescapable. Fate’s page tells him nothing, even as the slow, spreading stain of ink works further and further down the page.

Was it the stray bullet, or the festering wound it created? The safehouse they chose to escape to? The time Castiel wasted trying to care for a wound beyond his limited abilities to heal?

Was it Arathon, Arathon who waited patiently for Castiel’s return to that pharmacy? He wants to believe that. He wants everything to fall on Arathon; he had pleaded, _pleaded_ and Arathon had not listened.

Or was it him? Castiel. Dean Winchester’s guardian, at first by fate, then by the Mandate, and a thousand times after by choice.

That is the simplest answer, and the one he can’t shake free.

_When, and how, and where - where did I go wrong?_

This circular pursuit of answers - it is a consequence of the stillness, and the silence.

He should be _moving_ , finding the Colt, finding anything to kill Azazel, to stop the demons pursuing his vessel, to defend himself against Armisael’s unit - but he is here. Waiting.

He thinks of the sharp smell of cordite; of the Colt shining dully against concrete, cast aside from a dead man’s hand.

He rises slowly to his feet, collecting the cup of water from beside the cot. It’s empty, which is good. The ibuprofen bottle is nearby, which is also good. The untouched MRE, less so.

He heads out into the cold and fills the cup overflowing with snow, packing it in as tight as he can. It will melt down to little more than half a cup, but he has only managed to coax Dean into drinking one of these meager portions. He’s sweat out double that as he’s vacillated between chills and fevered heat.

The cup is still warm from the fire, and the snow melts down quickly. Castiel drops another handful of snow in before returning inside. He sets the cup back in its place. Dean has fallen asleep facing the fire - watching him, no doubt - and Castiel can see the sweat darkening the thin fabric of his t-shirt. These meager amounts of water aren’t enough; he’s drank, what, two? Three cups of water?

Maybe he will die of dehydration before he dies of whatever infection is settling into his lungs, while Castiel sits idly by.

No; if he follows the course Castiel has seen before, Dean will reach a state of delirium, at which point he’ll be able to coax him into drinking. Perhaps he will crush some pills into the water, as well; he might be able to set the hand, if he can get Dean to take a small amount of morphine beforehand.

He returns outside.

Bringing in wood is a pleasantly distracting task: the pain in his broken ribs forces him to focus on keeping his gait steady and his arms locked, leaving little room for any other considerations. But eventually he is winded and the pile is high enough. He settles on the floor next to Dean to place a few logs on the fire and warm his chilled hands. When that is done, he finds himself turning to consider the boy.

He’d dragged the cot a bit closer to the fire before returning to sleep, making it all the more apparent that his face is flushed from more than the fire. Hesitantly, he drops a hand against Dean’s forehead. He cannot tell if the fever has grown any worse, but it’s certainly still there.

He settles back, his hand returning - as it generally does - to press at his throbbing side. The bones aren’t knitting quickly, largely because he’s fighting to keep his grace away from it when he’s conscious enough to do so. He needs the grace. The penicillin is expired.

The penicillin is expired, the cough is getting worse, that broken hand may already be knitting wrong, and this _child_ won’t let Castiel near enough to fix it. This child that he doesn’t even know.

He _doesn’t_ know him, he thinks with a growing frustration: he doesn’t have anything to do with him. This boy is as foreign to Castiel as Castiel is to him.

And yet— and yet. Isn’t this all too familiar?

Everything except the boy before him.

He forces his eyes closed. The faces of the dead await him, there, framed in the perfection of angelic memory.

++++

Dean isn’t sure when he’s dreaming anymore. He thinks maybe his bones are made of ice, sometimes, because he feels brittle and cold, but sometimes it isn’t true. But Dad is gone, and Sam is gone, whether he’s dreaming or not. Sometimes he thinks he can hear Dad calling, but when Dean shouts for him he never answers. Sam went off flying, but he flies too high for Dean’s brittle bones.

“I’ll melt,” he says, “You have to put me back in the snow or I’ll melt.”

There’s something weighing on his forehead. He doesn’t realize until it’s gone, but it’s back almost immediately: icy cold and wet. It’s the anchor point, the rock from which the rest of him springs, stretching and fragmenting upward. 

He coughs, and he clinks together like wind chimes, or maybe like sandpaper. He remembers that he fell asleep around the embers, so he gathers them up and throws them out over the side, away from his bones. The embers are hot and angry, and they’ve welded themselves onto him, underneath his hand. Ugly things. He’ll let them go this time.

He’d been a person once, Dean knows, because he’d heard his dad talking about it. A missing person. _Illinois, goes missing in Illinois_. Now he’s just a corpse that shuffles around the room and doesn’t talk a lot. Dean puts a hand to the kid’s chest to make sure he’s real and not a dream, too. “I’m sorry I killed you. We were both people.”

But the corpse does talk this time, after he looks a little confused for a while. “You aren’t in the past tense yet, Dean.”

“My hand is melting off,” he corrects. Dead people can’t be expected to keep up on these things.

He coughs again—one of the bad ones that make his bones clink and rattle and tries to turn him inside out. He can hear his chest bones splintering every time, but he can’t help it. Not coughing is worse than coughing. Not coughing is like boiling; he can feel the water bubbling and roiling underneath his ribs, and if he doesn’t cough he’ll overheat and whistle like a teapot.

Afterward the dead kid offers him water, and Dean is grateful even though it’s bitter and warm. He’s so thirsty that he drains the whole cup and only spills a little of it on his shirt.

The cup disappears, and the world gets a little colder in its absence. A frigid wind crawls over Dean and prods at the fire, stirring it to spit and spark and jump. Then it gets cuts off, and the dead kid is back with a plastic bag full of snow. He ties it off and plants it on Dean’s hand.

Dean rolls his head to look at it. “You can’t make it grow back. It’s dead.”

“Is it?”

“There are hot coals underneath. The ice won’t go there anymore.”

“You never know.” He’s fiddling with something by the table. Some sticks, a roll of tape.

Dean turns to watch the ceiling again. Sometimes the shadows look like hands, sometimes like wings, sometimes like nothing.

He can feel the ice growing over his hand—not the bones, this time, but around his hand, encasing it. There are some places where the ice never stops growing; he could go live there, with the polar bears and the penguins and the other dead kids. Somewhere safe where he can’t get hurt. Hunters go after people like him. They have knives that burn and guns and scalding water and Sammy, who is a furnace, who burns like the Sun.

He can’t go live there. Dad is coming. He’ll never stop searching until he finds him, and then he’ll melt Dean down until there’s nothing left.

“Don’t let Dad salt and burn me, okay? I don’t want to die.”

“You aren’t going to die,” the kid says, like it’s fact. Maybe he should know; he’s already dead.

“And I’ll go live with the polar bears?” The polar bears look like a tough crowd. But Dean could take ‘em.

“Why would you want to do that?”

“The ice grows there. I don’t want to melt.”

“Oh.” The dead kid considers. “I suppose you could.”

Sam could fly his balsa airplane to visit. It’s a long way for a small airplane, but if he gets Dad to help wind the propeller, he could probably do it. He’ll need a parka and Eskimo boots to keep warm, but Dean’ll pay for it. He’s been saving. He’s been mowing lawns and washing cars, and when he’s older he can help Dad fix engines. Uncle Bobby’s been letting him help with the junkers.

He closes his eyes, opens them. The wings are on the wall again. Is this a dream?

The ice slushes around on his hand, and the kid is looming over him again. “How’s your hand? Still melting?”

Dean forgot about it. “Maybe?” He looks, but he can’t feel the embers anymore. The snow is a tomb for his dead hand.

“Can you feel it?”

“No, they’re burnt out.”

The kid frowns, and gently picks the hand up. “This?”

Dean nods. It’s amazing; he didn’t think any ice would grow there anymore, but the coals are gone and it’s cool and perfect. He could sleep now. He doesn’t think he’s slept in days; he’s so tired—

The ice splinters and fragments and scatters across the room in little shards as sharp as glass. He gasps at the shock of it. And then all his bones—they start to crack and quake like it’s a _disease_ , and it spreads up his arm, into his shoulder, his chest and even into his teeth. He turns his head away and screams, turns back and pleads, “ _No no no, no, please_ —“ 

He’s brittle as glass, breakable, pliable. He cries up to the ceiling but it doesn’t stop. The embers aren’t dead; they’re as bright as ever and they’re everywhere, and he’s on fire. The wings on the ceiling are crooked claws, reaching down for him.

It could go on forever: first one crack, and then two, three. Four. Each one echoing through every part of him. Then the ice is back, but it isn’t enough, not anymore. He’s burning.

“Please, stop,” he pleads. He tries to make himself small and insignificant, but he can’t. The monster has his hand and he won’t give it back anymore.

“I’m sorry, Dean.” He even makes himself sound it, but he’s lying. Monsters do that. “I’m nearly done. Don’t move your hand, alright? I’d rather not reset it.”

It hurts. It hurts it hurts it hurts. Please let this be a dream. Let him wake up and have it all be over, please, please. He just wants to go home. Dad can salt him and burn him if he likes, but please just let him come. He opens his mouth to cry but all that comes out is a long, silent whine and blubbering tears.

“Nearly done,” he says again, just standing there, big tall pale shadow cradling Dean’s hand. “It’s alright.”

He pulls off long pieces of tape and rips them with his teeth, lining them up on the metal edge of the cot. Maybe he’ll bundle all the embers up together nice and tight and tape them there, sparking, grinding.

“Please don’t,” he says, and sniffles, and tries to stop crying even though he doesn’t want to, “I don’t want to burn, please don’t make me.”

“The worst is done. I just need to brace it.” 

The ice goes away. Maybe he doesn’t crush all the glassy fragments of bone together, and maybe there aren’t any more brittle snaps and cracks to shake through him, but this goes on so much longer, the slow manipulation of first one finger and then the next and then the next. Sometimes edge catches edge and grinds, and it makes Dean want to throw up it hurts so bad. When that happens, the kid stops and the ice comes back, but never long enough. The ice always goes away, and it always starts again.

Until it does stop. The monster lets go.

Dean pulls his hand in close to his chest, tucks it away underneath the blankets and safe against his ribs. He’s shattered and useless, and now that the agony is gone he wants to sleep.

He whimpers against the fabric of the cot and hides his face.

++++

Dean sleeps like that: curled around the offended limb as if to protect it. It makes Castiel feel senselessly guilty. It had to be done; any longer and he would have had to break the bones to reset them, not just shift them back into place.

But he had hurt the boy, and it is all the more his fault. The hand wouldn’t be broken, if not for him. Twice over.

He hopes that he won’t have to touch it again.

That is midday. He waits until the sun is below the horizon before giving Dean’s foot a gentle shake. He sets his offerings down on the floor in front of him: a lukewarm plate of what had been labeled ‘beef stew’ and a full cup of water, supplemented with another two powdered ibuprofen tablets.

He doesn’t know that the ibuprofen is doing anything for the fever. It persists, too warm for comfort, and Dean hadn’t been cogent during their last… interaction.

Still, he rationalizes, this hasn’t gone too far. He doesn’t know what too far is, but this isn’t it, not yet. The fever might break, yet. The cough might improve.

There are dark half-circles beneath Dean’s eyes when he looks up to Castiel and accepts the cup of water. He doesn’t lift his head from the cot to drink; he sets the cup near his mouth and sips it sideways before handing it back.

He isn’t interested in the stew at all. Castiel persists, but Dean turns his head away. Eventually he sets the plate aside and falls back into a kneel, listening, observing. Dean isn’t coughing as much anymore, but there’s still an unnerving rattle to each inhale.

“How do you feel?” Castiel asks.

“Cold.” Dean pulls the blankets closer.

The gesture’s hindered with only one hand; Castiel pulls them higher, to Dean’s neck. “Does it hurt to breathe?”

“A little.” Dean stares at him from behind tired eyes. “Did you splint my hand?”

Castiel hesitates. “Yes.”

With similar hesitation, Dean pokes his broken hand out from beneath the blanket. “It’s poking me.”

“Where?” The new cast is a pathetic amalgam of what twigs Castiel could find, held together with dry-rotted tape from the first aid kit. Most of the bracing is on the inside of the hand. He had only placed a few twigs on the opposite side to provide countertension, but he can see that that side of the hand has swelled, forcing one of the twigs where hand meets wrist. Castiel reaches forward, and then stops, asking, “Can I see?”

Dean pushes the hand out a bit further.

It’s a show of trust, however small. With quiet surprise, Castiel says, “Thank you.”

It requires a small amount of finagling to work that particular piece of the makeshift splint loose enough to move upward within the tape holding it, and he has to take particular care not to jostle against the broken bones as he does so. The bones seem feather-thin and fragile, here, and yet the pain they can cause seems to be immense. He can just barely sense the fractures: the flare of inflammation around minute breaks in the thin bones, too freshly insulted to begin to fuse.

For any other angel, it would be a touch to mend this. It would be nothing.

Castiel shifts the twig and looks the hand over for further irritation points, but finds none. “That should help.” He picks up the makeshift ice pack - an empty MRE bag, now full of half-melted snow - and refills it outside. When he returns, he settles it as gently as he can around the splinted hand.

Dean draws it back underneath the wool with a mutter of thanks. His gaze returns to the fire.

Castiel settles cross-legged by the woodstove. The silence stretches thin between them before he finds himself abruptly announcing, “I’m sorry.”

He doesn’t know why. It just seems as good a time as any.

There’s enough silence afterward that Castiel believes Dean might have fallen asleep. The response that comes is tempered with fatigue. “I don’t know why you picked me. Was it ‘cause of my dad? Did he do something to you?”

“No. It doesn’t matter anymore.” He pauses. “I’m sorry I involved you in this.”

He was always going to be involved. But not now. Not so soon, and not so young.

“And the other ones?” There’s a rustle of blankets. Dean’s moved so he can see Castiel over the edge of the cot. “They’re like you, aren’t they?”

“Yes,” he admits. “But not in the ways that matter.”

He says that like it’s some point of pride, and maybe it was, once, but he doesn’t know that it is anymore. From the beginning of his fall, Castiel has suspected that there is some fundamental flaw to him, some vulnerability that none of his brothers and sisters possess. Maybe from his time sieging the gates of Hell, or maybe- maybe it’s always been a part of him, some susceptible aspect of Castiel’s personality that allowed one human to restructure his entire existence. To convince him to abandon everything, for—

For a cabin, and a sick boy, and nothing.

Dean plucks at his blanket. “Will they hurt my dad? Or my brother?”

“No.” He says that, but the thought worries him. He’s been watching Sam - he checks, now, and finds him still safe, still with Bobby. John is in—Pontiac? It doesn’t matter. The demons have only shown an interest in him, and the angels seem happy to wait. They’re safe.

But if his brothers grow impatient - if they choose to use Sam—

Castiel doesn’t know what he’ll do.

“Why do _they_ want me?” Dean asks.

“They—” He stutters to a stop, struggling to collect a comprehensible answer. “They’re fighting a war. They want to use you to win it.”

“Me? What, they need somebody to pack rock salt for him?” Dean breathes out a laugh that dissolves into another round of coughing. When he’s finished and has settled again, he gives a more serious answer. “You mean as a hostage against my dad. A prisoner.”

“No, they need you. As a— a host, a vessel. A body for one of us - the most powerful of us - to inhabit.”

Dean’s quiet for a long time after that. When he does speak, his voice is small. “I don’t want somebody to… wear me.”

“They won’t have you,” he says. The fervent tone behind the words surprises him, despite himself. But he speaks them truly: they won’t have Dean. He won’t let them.

Dean’s head disappears from view. There’s a sniffling noise and the blankets shift a bit. But he reappears rubbing at his nose. “You don’t like them. You said that before.”

“They took something from me,” Castiel replies, his voice flat.

“Will you teach me how to kill them? If I promise not to kill you, too?”

The question surprises him, the qualifier more still. He turns his head to regard the boy with a mixture of curiosity and resignation. “I don’t have the right weapon to kill them.”

“My dad has lots of weapons,” Dean says. He’s trying so earnestly, it’s a bit endearing. It shouldn’t surprise him that even a young Dean can be charming when it’s in his best interest. “Silver and blessed steel and cold iron and all sorts of other things.”

“Those don’t work on us,” he answers simply.

“Well. Think about it.”

Dean settles back into his cot again. The room goes quiet, except for the crackling of the fire. Castiel’s sure Dean has gone back to sleep; he moves to place more logs on the fire, but he finds Dean’s eyes open and reflecting the firelight.

“The body you’re in, that was somebody just like me, wasn’t it?” he asks, voice raspy from the silence.

Castiel busies his hands with tending the fire. “It is.”

“The one from Illinois?”

“Yes.”

Dean says nothing to that, and Castiel thinks he should explain. Dean is making it sound as though Jimmy is dead, and he isn’t. But explaining that Jimmy is alive might be all the more distressing, considering his current state. Any explanation of angelic consent would likely fall on deaf ears.

Before he can decide, Dean says: “How long are you gonna keep me here?”

He doesn’t answer immediately, because he doesn’t know.

_Until you’re too sick for expired medication and melted snow._

_Until 6:13 pm on March 24th._

_Until time runs out._

When he does answer, he simply says, “Until it’s safe.”

“How long’ll that take?”

“I’m not sure.”

Dean’s starting to sound agitated, now. “Are you really not sure, or do you just not want to tell me?”

“I’m really not sure,” Castiel answers, his own voice rising to match.

“You can’t keep me here forever.” Dean sits up. “A week, maybe a month, but I’ll get better and the snow will melt and I’ll escape. I will.”

Castiel forces his tone back to calm. “I’m not keeping you here forever.” He doesn’t have forever; the page in his back pocket is filling, line by line.

“Just—” Dean pauses and tries to bring his own tone back, to sound reasonable. “They need me. I’m supposed to look out for my little brother; it’s my job. And my dad—he says it’s his job to look out for me, and he won’t stop searching for me, _ever_ , and it’ll ruin him. So, please?”

“You have to understand, Dean. I’ve hidden you from the others. I haven’t hidden your family. The moment I return you to your family, they’ll find you. You _and_ I. And they will _not_ allow me the opportunity to free us again.”

By the panic rising on Dean’s face, Castiel immediately knows he’s misspoken. “But you said they didn’t want them.” His voice rises to a shout: “You said they were safe!”

“They don’t want them, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t watching them.”

“Then hide them, too!”

“I can’t—” Castiel stalls, frustrated. “I can’t do that.”

Dean’s face twists in equal frustration, but he turns his head to cough instead. The motion must shift something; he dissolves into wracking coughs, then curls around his chest, going still.

“Are you alright?”

Dean’s voice is thick. “Why do you care?”

“You should eat,” Castiel says, gesturing towards the ignored - and admittedly, unappetizing - stew.

Dean pries the blankets back enough to glare at him. With one disinterested glance at the soup, he rolls his head away. “I’m not hungry.”

“You need to eat.”

“No,” he responds, “I don’t.”

“Fine. Starve,” Castiel snaps. 

Back to where they began.

Castiel returns to stabbing at the fire. He can feel Dean’s resentful stare on the side of his head, but he keeps his eyes on the fire, stirring a flurry of sparks and spits from the wet pine. The cot squeaks as Dean climbs to his feet. Metal scrapes on wood as he pushes the cot back, away from the fire, as far as he can get from Castiel.

The cot squeaks again as Dean settles down. When Castiel finally spares the fire his attentions to look Dean’s way, the kid is glaring at him with a bright fury from beneath a pile of blankets.

He can’t decide if that’s any better than the looks of flat hate that had accompanied his repeated promises of John Winchester’s wrath.

Castiel closes the woodstove and retreats to the door. They once again sit opposed, 10 feet of frigid air between them.

Dean watches him for a long time, brows pulled together in an anger that turns bitter. He manages to scowl, even as his rattling breath evens into an approximation of sleep. 

Castiel is still roiling with his own anger, but he thinks it a good sign, Dean’s fury. This had been their first cogent conversation. He thinks the illness may be passing.

He’s wrong.

END ACT II, CHAPTER FOUR


End file.
